Class. 
Copyright W 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Beauty of Jesus 



The Beauty of Jesus 

Sermons preached in the Central Methodist 
Episcopal Church, Detroit, Mich. 

By the 

Rev. George Elliott, D. D. 

Of thb Detroit Conference 




CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND PYE 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



UeHMSY of CONGRESS 
Two Ooaies deceived 

JUN 29 1904 
Copyright Entry 



CLASS (X- XXo. No. 




,£.5534? 



COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY 
JENNINGS AND PYE 



FOREWORD 
* 

The discourses included in this volume have 
been prepared for publication by the somewhat ar- 
tificial process of being reduced to writing after 
extemporaneous delivery. This will account to any 
who heard them for any lack of the spontaneity and 
directness they may have possessed when spoken in 
the inspiration of their presence. What is best in 
any sermon is as much due to the audience as to 
the preacher. 

The only principle of selection employed was 
to present as large a variety of themes and treatment 
as possible within the limits allowed, and to include 
no message which had not been immediately useful, 
either in the awakening of conscience, the building 
up of faith and character, or persuasion to duty. 
All the sermons included have been delivered during 
the last three years. G. E. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. The Beauty of Jesus, 9 

II. The Macedonian Cry, - - 34 

III. The Lord of Life, 55 

IV. Love the Interpreter of God, 77 
V. Hardening the Heart, - - - 100 

VI. Marching to Music, - - - 126 

VII. The Fulness of God, - - - 151 

VIII. At the Beautiful Gate, - - 177 



I. 



THE BEAUTY OF JESUS. 

"Thou art fairer than the children of men'' — 
Psa. xiv, 2. 

"He hath no form nor comeliness: and when we 
see Him, there is no beauty that we should 
desire Him." — Isa. liii, 2. 

In the context of the passages from which the 
text is taken we see sharply contrasted the two 
great historical ideals of Israel — that of sovereignty 
and service. In the Messianic hope, Israel is seen 
through its coming king ruling the world in right- 
eousness ; on the other hand, in the prophetic vision, 
Israel through its representative, the Suffering 
Servant of Jehovah, is pictured as serving the world 
through surrender and sacrifice. In the New Testa- 
ment both these passages are applied to Jesus Christ, 
who has taught the world that service and sov- 
ereignty are one; that a shameful cross may be the 
most glorious throne; that the servant of all is, by 
that very fact, Lord of all. 

9 



io • The; Beauty o£ Jesus. 



While we see clearly enough, in the main, how 
these diverging ideals have found harmonious in- 
terpretation in our L,ord, yet it is not so easy to rec- 
oncile the details of the two pictures. How can we 
make the gracious and alluring beauty of the King 
agree with the uncomely and repelling features of 
the Servant? Was Jesus beautiful? And if He 
were, how shall we see in Him the marred visage 
that so disappointed the desire of man? 

No authentic portrait of the Master has reached 
us. The legend of Veronica and the napkin with 
which she wiped the bloody sweat from His suffer- 
ing face on the way to the cross, and which ever 
after bore the imprint of the sorrowful lineaments, 
like the other mediaeval tale which credits the con- 
ventional portrait to the artistic gifts of St. Luke 
the evangelist, is but a beautiful fable born of the 
loving longing of minds too prone to marvelous 
fancies. Yet in all the representations made in the 
different ages of the Church, there is sufficient like- 
ness to suggest some common artistic tradition 
which may have had a basis in reality. 

In spite of these common features, the pictures 
of Jesus drawn by different times and schools have 
been very different. The youthful and joyous Good 
Shepherd of the catacombs was born of a simple 



The: Beauty off Jesus. 



ii 



and childlike faith and the first gladness of the 
gospel proclamation. The stern and gloomy king 
of the Byzantine mosaics is a fit ideal for the faith 
that had grown imperial and despotic. The ema- 
ciated victim of the mediaeval painters echoes the 
ascetic feeling of that long hermitage of the human 
spirit. Yet it is only a confused image which these 
make when we try to combine them in our minds 
into some pictorial unity. 

Perhaps it is well that we have no picture. Each 
of us can frame for ourselves His likeness, and hang 
upon the walls of our imagination the face whose 
features are born of our own love's longing and our 
own inward communings with Him. How manifold 
the images we form of Him ! To the child, He still 
lies on His mother's breast, or with open-eyed won- 
der stands putting strange questions to the Temple 
sages ; to the laborer, He is still the carpenter toil- 
ing in the Nazareth workshop ; to the tempted, He 
still meets the hard testing of the will in the wilder- 
ness and vanquishes the tempter by His unshaken 
trust; to the weary, He still sits resting upon the 
wayside well ; to the bereaved, He still weeps beside 
the mourners at the tomb; to the tortured heart, 
He still endures Gethsemane's agony and bears its 
bloody sweat. We have seen "the glory of God in 



12 



The: Beauty of Jesus. 



the face of Jesus Christ/' but it was the glory of 
"grace and truth/' which bears for us the changing 
reflection of all our earthly vicissitudes. 

The religious art of the world has responded to 
this varied idealization. Each nation and race has 
painted a Christ of its own ; artists have everywhere 
seen in Him their own ideal. In marble and on 
canvas the one conventional face has passed through 
the metamorphic fires of all human experience and 
feeling; it saddens with sorrows, is distorted with 
pain, melts in tenderness, shines in the transfiguring 
light of joy, is hard set with determined courage, 
and calm with fathomless peace. 

Can you not see how hard it is to answer the 
question, Is He beautiful ? The truth is, that He is 
beautiful or repulsive according to the sympathy 
with Him which is in the heart of the beholder. 
The prophet expresses the aspect of Jesus to the 
world that despises and rejects Him; the psalmist 
paints the exultant vision of the Church that loves 
and worships Him. 

I. He is without beauty to the spirit of this 

WORED. 

The picture of the Suffering Servant of Jehovah 
pictures the place w^hich He holds in the world's 
regard : "We esteemed Him not." The martyr and 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



13 



the victim are not welcomed by the natural heart of 
man ; still less, the Atoning Sacrifice. And so it has 
become His lot to be the best beloved and the worst 
hated of all beings. When at last the predestined 
Victim came in the flesh, He won the cruel hate of 
all but a very few, and they were willing to die with 
Him and for Him. 

1. He is marred by suffering. 

The sufferer is the problem of philosophy and 
the test of faith. Pain is the world's chief mystery, 
the stumbling-block of humanity. Men are stag- 
gered by the unfailing tragedy which somewhere 
touches every life; it puzzles the reason, confuses 
the conscience, and paralyzes the will. The earliest 
literatures of all peoples are anxiously concerned 
about the sufferer. Tortured Prometheus, writhing 
on Caucasus while the vultures prey upon his vitals, 
is but a type of the anguished victim who strides 
through all the literature and art of the world with 
maddened brain and bleeding heart, making futile 
guesses at the unexplained agony of our human life. 
Only as men forget the sufferer have they found 
the fair ideals of passionless peace or glowing joy 
in which the sense of beauty rejoices. 

Beauty is the child of joy; it has no relation 
with the bed of pain or the horror of the shadow of 



i4 The; Beauty o£ Jesus. 



death. We look for it, and we see it, not in the 
wrinkles of age, the emaciation of disease, the weary 
lines of pain or the writhings of youth, but in the 
glowing vigor of health and the smiles of gladness. 

Our Lord is a a Man of Sorrows and acquainted 
with grief/' In His weary, weeping face, marred 
with the experience of suffering and sympathetically 
reflecting a world's woe, the world sees that which 
it most abhors and from which it shrinks in- 
stinctively. 

Jesus may have been a beautiful Babe. All lines of 
possible human loveliness may have marked the form 
pressed against the Holy Virgin's breast. Doubtless 
it was a fair-faced boy that grew up in the humble 
home at Nazareth and charmed the doctors with its 
grace as the sweet lips spoke words of more than 
childish wisdom in the Temple. That boyish beauty 
did not, could not last. His whole life-story, with 
its culminating tragedy, was only fitted to mar the 
loveliness which had filled Mary's heart with fond 
pride as He lay in her loving arms. Nay, she her- 
self, who was "full of grace," became at last the 
very mother of sorrows. And Jesus, when at last 
the lines of premature age and care write themselves 
in His face, at last flayed by the Roman scourge 
and torn by the thorny crown, His hair and beard 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



15 



clotted with His own gore and the spittle of rude 
soldiers 5 insult, when Pilate cries, "Behold the 
Man!" Was He beautiful? Let Guido's pathetic 
picture, "Ecce Homo," partly tell the story. The 
world has looked in answer to Pilate's challenge 
and turned away in repulsion, finding no beauty in 
Him, that they should desire Him. 

2. The Suffering Savior is a repellent ideal to 
the Pagan spirit. 

A skeptical historian has written that the painted 
crucifix is "the most repulsive object ever presented 
to the groaning adoration of mankind." Such is the 
real spirit of all mundane culture, not always so 
frankly avowed. The Hellenists of Greece and 
Rome, who were dismayed by the conquests of the 
pale Galilean; the sensuous epicures of the Italian 
Renaissance drunken with their sense of beauty, 
and our modern Neo- Pagans, who prate of "art for 
art's sake," — all are but so many expressions of the 
world-spirit to which the preaching of the Cross 
is foolishness. The Pagan ideal is one of abounding 
health and of sensuous beauty, untouched by any 
hint of the world's woe, and, in its buoyant joyous- 
ness, far away from the "Man of Sorrows, ac- 
quainted with grief." No wonder that our aesthetic 



1 6 The: Beauty off Jesus. 



class have little shame to prefer Apollo to the Christ, 
and Venus to the Madonna. 

In a popular French romance, of which Swin- 
burne says, 

" This is the golden book of spirit and sense, 
The holy writ of beauty," 

it is written: 

"O, ancient world! all that you held in rever- 
ence is held in scorn by us. Thine idols are over- 
thrown in the dust ; fleshless anchorites clad in rags 
and tatters, martyrs with the blood fresh on them, 
and their shoulders torn by the tigers of the circuses, 
have perched themselves on the pedestal of thy fair 
desirable gods. The Christ has enveloped the whole 
earth in His winding-sheet. . . . O purity, 
plant of bitterness, born on a bloodsoaked soil, and 
whose degenerate and sickly blossom expands with 
difficulty in the damp shade of cloisters, under a 
chill baptismal rain; rose without scent and spiked 
all round with thorns, . . . the ancient world 
knew thee not. O sterile flower! thou wast never 
enwoven in its chaplets of delirious perfume. In 
that vigorous and healthy society, they would have 
spurned thee under foot disdainfully. Purity, mys- 
ticism, melancholy — three words unknown to thee, 



The; Beauty of Jesus. 17 



three new maladies brought into our life by the 
Christ!" 

Ah, yes! our worldlings "spurn under foot dis- 
dainfully" the Christian conception of a suffering 
Savior. It finds the frank, full, and, let us hope, 
final statement in its favorite philosopher, Friedrich 
Nietzsche, the chosen teacher of thousands of our 
very modern young men, whose indictment against 
Christianity is that — 

"Everything strong, brave, domineering, and 
proud has been eliminated out of the concept of 
God, when He sinks step by step to the sym- 
bol of a staff for the fatigued, a sheet-anchor for 
all drowning ones ; when He becomes a poor peo- 
ple's God, the God of the sick par excellence, . . . 
the God of the nooks, the God of all dark places and 
corners, of all unhealthy quarters throughout the 
world! His world empire is still, as formerly, an 
underworld empire, a hospital, a subterranean em- 
pire, a Ghetto empire, and He Himself, so pale, so 
weak, so decadent!" 

Nietzsche has a fine gift for blasphemy ; forgive 
me for quoting his wild ravings. I would not defile 
this holy place and hour with this foul creed of 
sestheticism and culture were it not well that our 



18 The Beauty off Jesus. 



worldly Christians may for once stand face to face 
with the logical outcome of the secular scheme of 
life. Every soul who shrinks from the cross, and 
thereby affirms an outward and selfish aim for life, 
has practically denied Spirit and declined to the 
worship of sense. 

3. The ideal of sacrifice and suffering seems to 
destroy the beauty of life as it appears to the natural 
man. 

The whole conception of the Christian life as 
found in the New Testament is most repellent to 
unregenerate nature. Jesus makes the shadow of 
the cross fall across the whole of life. "If any man 
will come after Me, let him deny himself and take 
up his cross daily and follow Me. For whosoever 
will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will 
lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it." 
We are called to be "crucified with Christ/' called 
to the "fellowship of His sufferings." He has set 
up His cross in the pathway of our dearest long- 
ings and most ardent desires; our selfishness turns 
away from His sad features to the smiling welcome 
of the god of this world. 

Youth does not find Him beautiful ; for He is the 
rival to their frivolous pleasures, the spoil-sport of 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



19 



thoughtless mirth. He is shunned as a social kill- 
joy by those who forget how He made glad the 
marriage-feast. The question of worldly amuse- 
ments is a much deeper one than appears to the 
Pharisee fond of a preceptive morality. Worldli- 
ness as a spirit is a far more subtle and dangerous 
enemy of our Master than is dreamed of by the nar- 
row precisians \Vho construct for the Christian life 
a crazy-quilt of negative requirements, and call that 
spirituality ! "In the name of the Lord Jesus" is a 
phrase whose wide meaning is the last test of loy- 
alty. The cross stands at the parting of the ways 
where youth makes the great decision. 

The business man finds Him a meddler and mar- 
plot, a hindrance to all selfish gains. We no longer 
erect crosses in the market-place; commerce has lit- 
tle place for the spirit of sacrifice. 

Society does not desire a suffering Savior. It 
is largely made up of surfaces, and is enamored of 
surface beauty. It loves physical comfort and lux- 
ury, and shrinks from self-denial. The name of a 
hospital on the program of the charity ball is about 
as near as the world of fashion dares to comes to 
the purlieus of pain. The great trinity of the world- 
spirit, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and 
the pride of life," stands squarely opposed to the Di- 



2o The Beauty o£ Jesus. 



vine passion whose love finds its consummation in 
sorrow and sacrifice. 

4. The Church is in danger of ignoring the 
prophet's ideal. 

Even those who profess discipleship are luke- 
warm in His service and shirk His utmost demands. 
He asks so much, and seems to promise so little. 
He asserts His right, and offers no pleasures in re- 
turn. The Church too often tries to hide the cross. 
It has tampered with the Gospel, and painted a mer- 
etricious and sensuous heaven; it has glossed over 
the hard sayings of the Master, and explained away 
the mountain teaching and the cross example. An- 
other Paul might well cry out, in the presence of 
the easy-going, time-serving religion, too prevalent 
in every age of the Church, "Then is the offense 
of the cross ceased!" 

In the effort to make religion attractive, laud- 
able enough if we appeal to the real ground of its 
attractiveness, we are in danger of concealing its 
central truth, the atoning sacrifice, and its demand 
for the cross-bearing life. Like the crosses shaped 
of virgin gold and gemmed with diamonds, that 
adorn the breast of beauty ; like the Easter crosses of 



The: Beauty of Jesus. 



21 



languishing lilies or voluptuous roses, that deck our 
altars of worship, — so has the Church striven by 
aesthetic arts to suppress the sufferer and only see 
the conquering King. 

You profess to admire Him ; you have exhausted 
human arts to make music to praise Him, and rich 
crowns to deck His brow ; why, then, do you not 
really follow Him as He commanded? why do you 
prefer pleasure, gain, worldly success, and all selfish 
ends? It is all in vain that we hang garlands on 
the cross; the rough wood is there, with the cruel 
tearing of the nails and the sharp torment of the 
thorns. "His visage is marred more than the sons 
of men/' There is no beauty in Him to the spirit 
of this world. 

II. HE IS ALTOGETHER LOVELY TO THOSE WHO TRULY 
LOVE AND FOLLOW HlM. 



"Thou art fairer than the children of men/' 
What if the psalmist is right, and He is beautiful 
after all ? What if our aesthetic standards are wrong 
and true beauty something quite other than we have 
dreamed? May not the whole world be as utterly 
blind as the Hottentot who prefers his fat Venus 
to the classic lines of the Venus of Milo? If we do 




22 This Bsauty of Jesus. 



not desire Him, the fault is ours; our standard is 
false. Our appetite, perverted at the banquet of 
earthly delights, has lost relish for the Bread of 
heaven ; our fine dresses seem fairer and richer than 
the robes of righteousness; our jewels shine more 
splendidly to our sight than the "pearl of great 
price." 

i. In Holy Scripture our Lord is as closely asso- 
ciated with Beauty as with Suffering. 

The mobt beautiful things are used to describe 
Him. He calls Himself the Bridegroom, and to this 
lover of the soul we have, with reason, applied the 
glowing images of the nuptial odes ascribed to Sol- 
omon. He is the "fairest among ten thousand," and 
is "altogether lovely." He is the Rose of Sharon, 
all garden beauties pale in the sight of His loveli- 
ness; He is the Lily of the Valley, outrivaling all 
forest fragrances ; He is the bright and the Morning 
Star, most brilliant of all the orbs that glorify the 
night; He is the Sun of righteousness, the world's 
fountain of light and beauty. 

He is at once the archetype and the artificer of 
all beauty. In His eternal imagining it was born, 
and by His creative energy brought to birth. All 



The: Beauty of Jesus. 



23 



tints are painted by His brush, all forms created 
by His touch. 

He dearly loved beautiful things. Flowers blos- 
somed in His speech, and the bird-song lent softer 
music to His voice. Little children — those buds 
of the world's promise, fair with the fresh beauty 
of all first things, the first light of morning, the 
first flowers of spring, and the golden age of the 
world — were welcomed to His arms and made glad 
by His blessing. He chose for His favorite haunts 
the loveliest spots in the Holy Land, the hills about 
Nazareth, the grand heights of Hermon, and the 
rippling waters of sweet Galilee. 

All beauty is at last the beauty of God, and 
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is "the brightness 
of His glory and the express image of His person/' 
Was He a hungry peasant in a working garb, tired, 
fatigued, lonely, with hands hardened at the carpen- 
ter's bench, and raiment dusty w T ith weary wander- 
ings? Still the glory at times shone through, until 
upon Hermon, in transfigured splendor, heaven 
breaks through the walls of earth and the chosen 
three beheld His glory. How the vision burned itself 
into their souls ! They never could forget it, and a 
generation later Peter writes, "We were eyewitnesses 



24 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



of His majesty, for He received from God the Father 
honor and glory while, surviving two generations, 
the best beloved, who had lain on His bosom and seen 
deepest into His heart, cries, "We beheld His 
glory!" 

2. The beauty of Jesus is the beauty of the Duty 
ideal 

Beauty is more than form and color; it lies 
deeper than the flesh, and its deepest life is in the 
soul. Even the Greeks, with all their delight in 
physical grace and symmetry, felt this, and loved 
to use their word for beauty as a synonym for good- 
ness. 

" I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty ; 
I woke, and found that life was duty." 

The waking thought does not deny the glory of 
the dream. The worldly ideal is true enough, but 
too narrow to express the fullness of life. For life 
is more than shapely form, and glowing tint, and 
sensuous charm. It is more than feeling; it is also 
thought and action. The beauty of Jesus is the 
nobler beauty of the deed ; His will moves always on 
the lines of a diviner perfection. That which is best 
in us worships moral above merely physical beauty. 



The Beauty oe Jesus. 



25 



Duty! it hath no form nor comeliness; it is grim- 
visaged with the awful severity of Law ; yet, to the 
obedient, it takes an angelic grace. Well does 
Wordsworth say in his "Ode to Duty:" 

" Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
Nor know we any thing so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face. 
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 
And fragrance in thy footing treads." 

The duty ideal bears the marks of wounds. It 
can achieve its highest only by the way of sacrifice. 
Its hands are hard with toil; its back is bent with 
burdens ; its features are deep-lined with care ; it is 
scarred and marred by suffering. And yet it, too, 
is beautiful. To be sure, a fond and doting mother 
would prefer her son, a finely-formed athlete in the 
glory of youthful strength and abounding health, 
rather than a helpless cripple or a wasted consump- 
tive. But there is something better than that ! She 
knew it when he came home bearing the glorious 
scars of a heroic deed, won in defense of God or 
home or native land. Love sees love's service in the 
marred face, and leaps out to meet it in a new ad- 
miration, whose tenderness finds it more fair than 
all old fondness ever dreamed. 



26 



Ths Bsauty otf Jesus. 



Love means Suffering. Sacrifice is its utmost 
expression. Even Plato, most Christian of all Pa- 
gan seers, knew that the face of love must be a 
marred face. In the "Symposium" he says: 

"Love is always poor, and is far from being fair 
and tender as the many suppose, but is lean, ill- 
formed, shoeless, and homeless, a poor penniless 
wanderer, sleeping at doorways, or on waysides with 
the sky above him." 

Even so the Love that was Divine in form and 
feature did not think that likeness of glory a thing 
worth His grasping, but, stripping Himself of heav- 
enly splendors, assumed the form of the slave, and 
"being formed in fashion as a man, became obedient 
unto death, even the death of the cross," and thus 
He won the crown of highest sovereignty. 

In this moral beauty, Jesus has no rival; He is 
the "fairest of the children of men." It is the voice 
of Jehovah in the same psalm : "Because Thou hast 
loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore 
God, even Thy God, hath anointed Thee with the 
oil of gladness above Thy fellows." To our in- 
ward sense the cross, with all its shame, stands as 
the loveliest thing in all the universe. It stands 
as the symbol of the deed of all deeds most beauti- 



The: Beauty o£ Jesus. 



27 



ful; it shines with the beauty of God, revealing the 
soft splendor of redeeming love. 

" For so the Word had flesh, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds, 
In loveliness of perfect deeds 
More strong than all poetic thought. " 

3. The beauty of the suffering Savior is a spir- 
itual beauty. 

There is a "light that never was on land or sea/' 
a glory that the eyes of sense shall never see, — it is 
the beauty of the redeemed spirit, and is seen only 
by spiritual vision. Bodily beauty is only skin- 
deep, and to the gaze that penetrates beneath the 
surface it vanishes; the X-rays reveal the skeleton. 

Modern art has not rivaled the Greek power of 
expression; its real and surpassing glory is, that 
it has dared to attempt more, has tried to interpret 
the spirit of man. In Christian art a new kind of 
beauty has been born, a rare and exquisite thing, 
luminous with the radiance of the unseen world. 
Hear Robert Browning portray this deeper ideal : 

" Paint man, man, whatever the issue ! 
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, 

New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters ; 
To bring the invisible into full play, 
I^et the visible go to the dogs ! what matters ?" 



28 The Beauty of Jesus. 



The sight of the worldling can not compass this 
nobler vision ; he can not see the real beauty of the 
marred face. It must be "spiritually discerned." 
But the eyes of spiritual insight see beneath all 
mere prettiness. External fairness may cover spir- 
itual foulness. As in the Greek fable, let the phi- 
losopher's gaze fall on the comely face of Lamia, 
and the enchantment breaks, and she is seen to be 
what she is, a serpent. Ah ! it is saddening enough 
sometimes, this sudden revelation of character, blaz- 
ing through its outward mask. We visited the 
palaces of pleasure and pride, and mingled in the 
glad gayety of society, and suddenly the revealing 
flash came. We saw beneath the fair faces that 
smiled on us the signs of approaching corruption, 
the petty vanity, the selfish spirit, the suppressed 
ill-temper, the disguised deceit, the lines of cruelty 
and of sensuality. Ugliness was there, hiding be- 
neath the mask of beauty, and the fair face was 
fair no more. Yes, and often beneath plain features 
and uncouth forms, our eyes have caught a glimpse 
of a shining soul ; it was a hint of the spiritual body 
which transforms earth's dishonor into heaven's 
glory; it was a foregleam of the resurrection. 

The peasant artist, Millet, has in immortal pic- 
tures portrayed beauty hidden beneath homely things 



The Beauty o£ Jesus. 



29 



and homely lines. O, if we could only see souls, the 
world would be changed to us! Many a fair face 
would grow hideous, and many a deformed body 
would shine as the casket of spiritual and immortal 
loveliness. 

And this is the beauty of our Lord. All heav- 
enly ideals have left their lines of beauty in His 
perfect character and perfect life. This is the beauty 
of the glorified Lord, who, having been made "per- 
fect through suffering/' has now shined in human 
hearts through the effusion of the Spirit. It is the 
beauty and glory of God, and it shines for us in the 
face of Jesus Christ. 

4. The Suffering Savior is not an ascetic ideal. 

Jesus is neither aesthetic nor ascetic. He does 
not correspond to the standards of worldly desire 
and esteem ; neither does His life and teaching give 
any countenance to those who would abandon the 
world, despising its beauty and neglecting its duty. 
The stoic, the Buddhist, the monk say: "Renounce! 
flee from this dying, decaying world ! Give yourself 
wholly to the unseen life." But the cross simply 
erects a new scale of values; in its light the world 
becomes a means and not an end. We learn to "use 
the world as not abusing it." To this illumined 



30 The: Beauty of Jesus. 

vision the creation, once our delight, gains a new 
glory as revealing the Creator. Its mountain altars 
become white with the snows of His holiness, and 
kindle their altar-fires at the touch of His finger; 
its lilies are the spotless raiment of His purity, and 
all the flowers of the field are fragrant with His 
breath; the breezes swing the censer of perpetual in- 
cense. Therefore has God kindled the mornings, 
embroidered the meadows, and hung the lamps of 
the midnight, that we might see in it all the "living, 
visible garment of God." 

" Karth 's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush aflame with God." 

The ascetic ideal sees only the marred face of 
the sufferer, the figure without "form or comeliness," 
and does not behold the real beauty in and beneath 
it. For asceticism is devoid of love, and love is 
linked with beauty in all philosophies and all faiths. 
Denial of the world is not self-denial. The Man of 
Sorrows "came into the world to save sinners the 
mystic devotee goes out of the world to save him- 
self. The whitest sanctity of the kingdom can not 
be achieved by cloistered souls. The sneer of cul- 
ture has too often identified Christianity with asceti- 
cism, and on that ground given its suffrage to the 
"healthy sensuality" of Paganism. That is to miss 



The: Beauty o£ Jesus. 



3i 



the meaning of the cross. Atoning sacrifice, vi- 
cariously borne through a voluntary act of all-sur- 
rendering love, — that is the supreme beauty of Jesus ; 
and it is worlds away from the self-regarding vir- 
tue of asceticism. Listen to the words of the great 
prophetic poet, who sings the song of the Suffer- 
ing Servant of Jehovah: 

" But our sickness alone He bore, 
And our pains — He carried them, 
Whilst we esteemed Him stricken 
Smitten of God and afflicted. 

But alone He was humiliated because of our rebellions, 
Alone He was crushed because of our iniquities ; 
A chastisement, all for our peace, was upon Him, 
And to us came healing through His stripes. 

All we, like sheep, had gone astray, 
We had turned every one to his own way, 
While Jehovah made to light upon Him 
The iniquity of us all." 

" Forasmuch as he poured out His life-blood, 
And let Himself be reckonded with the rebellious, 
While it was He who had borne the sin of many, 
And for the rebellious had interposed." 

That is no picture of ascetic renunciation to win 
personal perfection, but of loving self-denial for 
the salvation of others. 

O, my beloved, does the sermon need any appli- 
cation? Does not the uplifted Christ draw you? 



32 The: Bsauty of Jesus. 



Does not that vision of mingled sorrow and love 
touch some finer sense than all the fair shows of the 
world's pleasure, power, or pride? Will you win 
for yourself this higher beauty ? There is something 
gladder than pleasure, more glorious than gain, more 
splendid than success. It is found in the way of 
the cross, in the footsteps of Jesus. 

There is a beauty that lies beyond beauty, and 
can only be reached by the road of pain. My friend 
had a noble voice, that had been carefully trained 
by the greatest masters. It was a noble organ, used 
with matchless technique. Yet, somehow, it did not 
touch us. We admired, but were not thrilled in the 
depths of the spirit. Suddenly a great sorrow came 
into her life, and it has added the note of true pas- 
sion to the glorious voice, and made it sovereign to 
sway hearts. The men of sorrows have given the 
world its truly greatest poems, pictures, and music. 

" They learned in suffering what they teach in song." 

Even so, the life of truest loveliness, of highest holi- 
ness and noblest service, is only wrought out by 
the discipline of pain. We are, like our Lord, "made 
perfect through suffering." Walking in the way of 
the cross, by the transfiguring power of the Lord, 



The Beauty of Jesus. 33 



the Spirit, we shall be "changed into the same image, 
even from glory into glory." 

Sovereignty and Service, the King and the Suf- 
ferer — in the human God and the Divine man we 
find united the ideals of Beauty and Duty. They 
may be so united in our lives; "If we suffer with 
Him, we shall also reign with Him." The Cross 
and the Crown meet in the Christian conception of 
life; for loving self-surrender and spiritual mastery 
are one. The beauty of Jesus — it may b£ ours. 
"Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." 



3 



II. 



THE MACEDONIAN CRY. 

"And a vision appeared to Paid in the night; there 
stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, say- 
ing, Come over into Macedonia, and help us." — 
Acts xvi, 9. 

Ths context from which the text is taken is re- 
markable for two reasons. In the first place, it be- 
gins the only strictly personal narration in the New 
Testament, the so-called "We-narrative" of Acts. 
We have here, most probably, an absolutely original 
source, a long extract from the travel diary of the 
beloved physician, Luke, w r ho joined Paul at Troas, 
and accompanied him to Philippi, where he seems 
to have been left in charge of that new-formed 
Macedonian Church. 

But the account is still more interesting for the 
second reason; it is the story of the beginnings of 
world evangelization. We stand here at the well- 
head of that river of gracious influences, which here, 
bursting its Asiatic bounds, has widened into the 

34 



The Macedonian Cry. 



35 



Christian civilization of W estern Europe and Amer- 
ica. How little did Nero, upon his imperial throne, 
the contending politicians of the decadent Roman 
Senate, the busy merchants and pleasure-seekers of 
Corinth, or the pedantic philosophers of Athens, sus- 
pect that on the borders of the west, facing toward 
the sunset there stood a Jewish tentmaker, with his 
humble companions, whose message and ministry 
should change the whole character of the empire and 
turn the entire trend of earthly history. Such is the 
outward insignificance and the real greatness of the 
event we are about to study. 

I. The Peace and the Period were both 
Strategic. 

Here at the Hellespont, then, as now, dull Asia 
comes face to face with energetic Europe; it is a 
world meridian parting the East from the West. 
Even now, after nineteen centuries, it is the most 
important frontier in all the world. 

i. The place is rich in historic interest. 

It is in the Troad, at or near the site of ancient 
Ilium, whose fall is storied in the childhood of the 
world. The scene is full of historic associations and 
of stimulus to the historic imagination. Paul did not 



36 The Beauty of Jesus. 



need to be a great classical scholar to be familiar 
with the story of the Iliad, which was woven into 
the very fiber of the Hellenic peoples of Hellas and 
Asia Minor. Troas is thronged with great mem- 
ories, — of Troy town and its tragic tale ; of Priam's 
palace and its fatal fall. Here are the graves of 
Hector and Achilles, the rival heroes of the East and 
West, and the scenes made immortal by the undying 
song of the blind bard of Greece ; here rise the story- 
haunted mountains, such as sacred Ida ; and storied 
streams, the Scamander and the Granicus, that once 
ran red with heroes' blood and rolled their shields 
and bodies to the sea, and whose silver ripples still 
seem to sing a strange poetry of the past. 

Not only so, but it looks westward, across the 
iEgean, whose islands, Tenedos, Lemnos and Les- 
bos, bear names full of fabled glory. This narrow 
strait connecting the Euxine and the JEgean is the 
gateway by which from dawn of time, nations have 
passed in their migrations and armies in their con- 
quests. This way mad Xerxes led his barbarian 
hordes to overrun Greece, only to be hurled back as 
the wild waves are by the rocks ; this way Alexander 
came to the conquest of the East, unknowingly cast- 
ing up a highway on which the footsteps of Jesus 
marched to victory; and by this road the Roman 



The Macedonian Cry. 



37 



legions carried the imperial eagles, and with their 
short swords carved out a universal empire. And 
here, at last, stands this visionary Jew, with his three 
humble companions, looking across the Hellespont 
and iEgean Sea, not wholly unmindful, we think, 
of the mighty human story they recall, yet dream- 
ing of a world conquest more divine than ever 
burned in the stern souls of warriors or of kings. 

2. It is a notable episode in the history of the 
"Eastern Question." 

The East is facing the West. There has always 
been an Eastern Question, and there always will be, 
until the Lord Christ's kingdom comes in perfect 
power — that kingdom in which there is neither ''jew 
nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free/' The 
contest between Oriental and Occidental ideals is 
irrepressible ; peace can only come when they are 
both fused in nobler and more inclusive world-ideals. 
The contest has gone on since time immemorial ; 
its beginnings are lost in legend. The fabled rape 
of Europa (which still gives its name to the Bos- 
porus) ; the rape of Helen, and the Trojan war 
that ensued; the Persian wars which raised Greece 
to greatness; the conquests of Alexander, Pompey, 
and Caesar; the conflict with the Moslem from the 



38 The Beauty of Jesus. 



crusades down to the present dying throes of the 
'''Sick Man of Europe the contest between Saxon 
and Slav for Asiatic supremacy, — all these are but 
the external incidents of a spiritual struggle between 
the East and the West, the past and the future, the 
old and the new, the living and the dead. Byzan- 
tium is still the gate of empire; well does the un- 
speakable Turkish sultan, who rules there, call him- 
self the Sublime Porte; i. e., the High Gate. 

And yet there is one supreme gift that the Orient 
has given to the world — religious faith. Monothe- 
ism was born in the awful silences of those deserts, 
where "man is distant and God is near." No great 
religion has been born on any but Asiatic soil. Light 
comes from the East, but travels with the sun. 
"Westward the course of empire takes its way." In 
Paul we see the greatest of all the many instruments 
who have brought the Light of the East to be re- 
kindled in Western hearts. This was the supreme 
test of the gospel ; it had won in Western Asia ; could 
it succeed in Europe? The partially Orientalized 
Hellenists of Asia Minor have been easily touched 
by the new faith; will the cultivated Grecian and 
stout Roman listen as readily? Will the proud 
Aryan be arrested by the message of the Semite? 
The journey proposed by Paul, from Troas to Phil- 



The Macedonian Cry. 



39 



ippi, was short in miles, but it lay from pole to pole 
of the human spirit. 

Without anticipating our further discussion, you 
know the result. The Pauline solution of the "East- 
ern Question" was triumphant wherever applied. 
Racial and political lines are lost in the radiance of 
this sunburst of salvation. The prow of Paul's lit- 
tle ship, as it cleaved the blue JEgean, not only flung 
into foam those classic waters, but cut to tatters the 
artificial distinctions of law and custom, as well as 
the deeper natural characteristics of race and na- 
tional spirit. Henceforth the true Israel are all 
mankind. Indeed, there is something typical in that 
first Church he founded in Macedonia. It inclosed 
many and varied national types ; its charter members 
were a Jewish proselyte woman who had come 
thither from Asia Minor, a Greek slave girl with the 
sinister reputation of a Pythoness or inspired mouth- 
piece of Apollo, and a Roman officer, the jailer of the 
town. It was a prophecy of that universal Church 
which still remains to be realized. 

3. It was a time of world-crisis. 

The period was not less significant than the 
place. The West was in search of a religion ; ancient 
cults were losing their charm; Ethnic faiths were 



4Q 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



decadent; the temples were crumbling and the old 
gods were becoming forgotten. There had been 
preparation, both in politics and in culture, for the 
new faith. The conquests of Alexander and Caesar 
had given the world a universal empire under whose 
protecting, aegis of law the gospel was sheltered. 
Greece gives to the East its language of common 
intercourse, the richest and most marvelous tongue 
ever spoken among men. The boy Paul, in Tarsus, 
learned as the common speech of his childhood the 
language in which he afterward preached in Mace- 
donia and Achaia. Plato and Aristotle had opened 
intellectual doors which the new faith readily en- 
tered, enriching its simple spiritual ethic with their 
philosophic statement. The human race had come 
of age to receive its royal inheritance; it was the 
"fullness of the times." 

It was also a crisis in the life of Paul. His own 
wish was to complete his Asiatic triumphs. He looks 
longingly toward Bithynia, and southward toward 
proconsular Asia. In some mysterious way God 
closes up every path. He can turn neither north- 
ward nor southward, and he can not go back, while 
a vision of the night guides him forward and west- 
ward. The chaotic social and moral world lies plas- 
tic to the brooding Spirit of God. The place and 



The Macedonian Cry. 



4i 



period are providential, and Paul is under providen- 
tial guidance. The new mission grew out of his 
thwarted plans. 

II. The Man and His Message are Matched 
with the Providential Purpose. 

Paul is the man for the opportunity. He is a 
Hebrew of the Hebrews, learned in the law of Israel, 
versed in its history, saturated with its ideals ; he 
was born a Roman citizen, and can everywhere plead 
the protection of Roman justice for his w T ork; he 
was born in a great Grecian city, and could speak 
the Greek language, and had absorbed to some ex- 
tent its philosophy and culture. By character, birth, 
and training, he was the predestined world evan- 
gelist, the chosen apostle of expansion. If we count 
Jesus as we must, the first and greatest of all mis- 
sionaries, next to Him we must certainly place Paul, 
who so passionately loved and so loyally served 
his Master. 

1. He is a man of visions. 

His conversion was caused by a vision beheld 
at noonday on the Damascus road. His ministry 
was guided by direct revelations through sight and 
speech from God. A supernatural element filled his 



42 The: Beauty oe Jesus. 



life and shaped it. He was under a heavenly con- 
trol, and is ever sensitive to the Divine guidance. 
To our modern Sadduceeism all this savors of fa- 
naticism and mysticism. Yet there is in it nothing 
exceptional or strange. If our lives are without 
this constant shaping by the unseen hands, it is 
because we constantly leave God out of our pro- 
grams and plans of life. If we would live on Paul's 
high level, we, too, would be led by great inspira- 
tions and have mighty monitions of the unseen. We, 
too, may "see visions and dream dreams/' and have 
the pillar of cloud and fire to mark paths for us 
through the blind wilderness of our thwarted pur- 
poses. Every great work begins in a dream. The 
lofty souls who have dared greatly and done nobly 
were those who first had dreamed splendidly. 

2. He is a man of heart. 

The day-dream came to the right man. The 
world's need was great; it lay in the arms of the 
wicked one, and was submerged in poverty, igno- 
rance, and sin. The anguished cry of the great hu- 
man tragedy could not be heard by any shut-up soul. 
Nero, the emperor, that graceful tiger, with his 
superficial, sensuous love of beauty, his dilettant 
culture, and his cruel heart, could see the voluptuous 



The: Macedonian Cry. 



43 



lines of a Greek statue and enjoy the "linked sweet- 
ness" of "soft Lydian airs/' but he had no eyes to 
see debased manhood, or ears to hear the wail of suf- 
fering humankind. The vision could not come to 
the petty politician of the Senate, nor to any stern 
soldier of the legions, nor to some severe Stoic or 
easy-going Epicurean of Athens, nor to a purse- 
proud trader of Corinth or Alexandria. The call 
came to a heart full of all human tenderness, one 
who could greatly love and nobly sacrifice. This is 
the quality to which God makes appeal for help in 
His redemption task, and it is this quality which 
mankind at last shall crown above all others. 

3. He is a man of action. 

With Paul to hear is to obey. He is no imprac- 
ticable dreamer, but a practical man, who translates 
his dream into reality and by his visions shapes his 
life. It was so from that first call to service on the 
Damascus road ; he "was not disobedient to the heav- 
enly vision. " His dream cost him something. It 
meant more than to paint it in a glorious speech; 
it meant suffering and sacrifice, with martyrdom at 
the end of it all. So when the Divine vision and 
voice comes, he acts as becomes the bondservant 
of Jesus Christ. The hand of God is upon him, and 



44 Ths Beauty of Jesus. 



before another night can bring another dream his 
boat is plowing toward the sunset, answering the 
call for help. 

One could imagine his friends trying to dissuade 
him. Silas might say: "It is just like you, Paul. 
You would not stay at Antioch, but would on to 
Cyprus and Asia Minor. If you should reach Mace- 
donia, you would not be content, but would go to 
Corinth and Athens, and then begin to plan a voy- 
age to Rome. And even that would n't satisfy you, 
but I suppose you will press on to Spain and Britain. 
Nor would you rest there, but would stand beside 
the western sea of darkness, and begin to dream of 
that fabled lost Atlantis beyond." And then Dr. 
Luke might exhort: "Consider your frail health, 
Brother Paul. Remember how you took the grippe 
on the unhealthy Pamphilian coast, and the illness 
which followed in Galatia. You haven't been the 
same man since. It has left a thorn in your flesh, 
w T hich will probably last as long as you live." 

But it w T as not for long that they thus argued, 
if at all. They soon were all of the same mind; 
for we are told that "putting things together [all 
the providential indications], they assuredly gath- 
ered" that it was God's will that they should go to 
Macedonia. And so these four great simple- 



The; Macedonian Cry. 45 



minded, wise-hearted children set out to conquer 
Europe. Not theirs the visions of battles, but a 
nobler vision of manhood delivered and souls re- 
deemed. 

4. Paul had a message of world-wide meaning. 

He was by conviction the apostle of expansion. 
The circumstances of his conversion and call had 
given him a wider conception of the gospel than the 
Jerusalem Church had yet attained. He had broken 
through Jewish exclusiveness, and made the whole 
world his parish. To him humanity was one; all 
lost in Adam, and all included in the mercy of the 
Cross. He had a universal message, one that could 
be translated into universal speech. Beneath all ra- 
cial types, national traits, differences in customs, and 
culture, he saw the moral unity of man. Neither 
anthropology, ethnology, nor philology could stand 
in the way of his mission. These cleavages do not 
go very deep after all. All hearts know the dark 
mystery of sin and can comprehend the bright mes- 
sage of redeeming and pardoning love. It is a test 
of a true gospel that it can be translated into all the 
forms of human speech and human thought. 

Christianity is a universal religion. Christ is 
the Desire of all nations, the solitary Hope of a dy- 



46 The: Beauty oe Jesus. 



ing race. Other teachers — Socrates, Buddha, Con- 
fucius, Zoroaster — may have been, in some sense, 
true prophets of God; but there is but one Savior. 
His is an empire overlapping Rome ; the Holy Dove 
shall outfly her eagles and the dark raven of sin; 
upon His cross Greece shall hang her laurels. The 
gospel is power, universal power for salvation; its 
ambassador is not ashamed to proclaim it in philo- 
sophic Athens, voluptuous Corinth, commercial 
Ephesus, pagan Antioch, or imperial Rome. 

III. The Vision and the Voice are both signif- 
icant. 

Visions are revealers of life. What we are de- 
termines what we see, whether waking or sleeping. 
We dream of what is in our minds. The miser's 
eyes are full of the yellow luster of his gold; the 
mother sees in fancy the fair face of her babe; 
the merchant beholds bargains and profitable ven- 
tures; the soldier's sleep is stirred with the sounds 
of strife. What does such a man as Paul see in his 
vision ? 

i. He saw a man. 

It may be significant that no note is made of any 
class distinction. It is a man, — not a priest, war- 
rior, laborer, king, peasant, or philosopher; it is 



The Macedonian Cry. 



47 



a representation of our common humanity, and thus 
a mouthpiece of groaning creation, with a voice 
tuned to utter the sigh of the race. To be sure he 
is specialized as a Macedonian ; the dream that leads 
to duty must be definite. 

"As Jesus passed by He saw a man/' Love puts 
the human interest in the center of all its pictures ; 
nothing else is so pathetic and inspiring. Yet we 
are often blind to it. Books, art, sciences, dollars, 
all may shut out our brother's face. And when we 
do try to study the human problems we are so apt 
to see masses, not man. The devil wants us to ar- 
gue abstractly rather than concretely, and he there- 
fore tries to obscure our vision of the individual. 
Your sham reformer has some social nostrum for 
saving society, and only a lukewarm interest in per- 
sonal effort for saving souls. And so sociology is 
substituted for salvation and reformation for re- 
demption. It is all in vain. Every great question 
of human welfare — the drink question, the labor con- 
flict, the problems of criminology — are of living in- 
terest only because they touch human flesh and blood. 
And no questions are worth more than passing- 
discussion which do not somewhere touch the quick 
nerves of human feeling. O, that our eyes might 
be opened to this vision, sad yet stimulating, of man, 
solitary in his sin, sorrow, and suffering ! 



48 The; Beauty of Jesus. 



2. He saw a man in need. 

It is a man in earnest, who cries, "Come, help P 
It is not implied that Macedonia was conscious of 
its need. No deputation came to meet Paul on his 
arrival; no crowds greeted him at Philippi. But 
the world's want is a call upon our hearts for sym- 
pathy and succor. The call was really from God, 
who inspired the vision; for every vision of need 
is a command of Christ. The wretchedness of the 
world is a pull on the heartstrings of every true 
Christian. These visible voices greet us in our own 
streets; while the far-off heathen world out of its 
unspeaking need cries : "Guide us, for we are blind ; 
comfort us, for we are sad; deliver us, for we are 
in bondage ; help us, for we are weak ; save us, for 
we are lost." 

3. Notice Paul's interpretation of the Voice. 

"Help!" What does it mean? It might have 
meant many things to other minds. The semi-civ- 
ilized and undeveloped races, and heathen countries 
generally, cry with a various language to our civ- 
ilized ears. In every open door the merchant sees 
a call for commerce or a chance for exploiting their 
undeveloped resources; the soldier sees the need of 



The; Macedonian Cry. 



49 



subjugation and conquest ; the statesman sees a new 
opportunity to play the pretty game of world pol- 
itics. Recent events have shown that alleged Chris- 
tian nations are but too ready, under the disguise of 
alleged military necessity, commercial greed, and 
"spheres of influence," to disregard utterly all the 
rights of the weaker nationalities. It is not civiliza- 
tion which the world needs, but the gospel. There 
is no greater peril than a dead-ripe civilization, with- 
out religious and human ideals. For it is only the 
salvation of Jesus that can bring real liberty. En- 
lightenment, peace, and culture, — they may be a bane 
rather than a blessing without it. Probably there is 
not another nation in the world which is in so great 
a moral and social danger as the Empire of Japan 
in its mad haste to adopt the fruitage of Western 
civilization without passing through the process by 
which that fruit grew, blossomed, and burst into 
beauty. 

Paul knew better. The world needs help, and 
the gospel is the help it needs. And so he brought 
them, not new inventions, fresh speculations, fond 
philosophies, armies and warships, but a new life 
in God. Nor did he bring them a religious war, 
a mere crusade against idols, priests, and temples, 
but a man's ministry to manhood, the new brother- 
4 



50 Ths Beauty o? Jesus. 



liness born of our love of our Father which is in 
heaven and the cross of our Brother and Redeemer. 

4. What was the outcome of the vision? 

At first, apparently, only little. He came to 
Philippi to find, not a man, but a company of women 
holding a prayer-meeting in a quiet nook by the 
river-side. Yet there began the first Church in 
Europe, the most loved and most loving Church of 
the New Testament. Under Paul's preaching, Jesus 
Christ won that day a nobler victory than that which 
Julius Caesar had won at Philippi a generation or 
two before. It began with the conquest of a wo- 
man's heart, but it meant the subjugation of the 
Western world to the Cross. In the background of 
the dream, behind the man with his beckoning hands 
and pleading voice, was all Greece and imperial 
Rome; more, there were, in shadowy distances, the 
vigorous Northern nations and far-off America it- 
self, then lying hidden in the secrecy of God and the 
fastnesses of His purpose, awaiting the coming of 
other providential moments and other men with 
great visions of spiritual victory in their eyes. 
When the gospel conquered us, we became debtors 
to the dream and the swift obedience of the apostle. 

What if he had not obeyed the voice? The 



The: Macedonian Cry. 



51 



chariots of the Christ, rolling on their way to the 
millennial glory, too long delayed as it is, might 
have dragged more heavily and lingered longer in 
the track of time. The new faith might have gone 
eastward against the tides of life and march of light ; 
might have subdued the Arab, the Persian, the Hin- 
doo, and the Chinaman, and we to-day be receiving 
the truth of Jesus at the hands of Oriental teachers. 
But, just because he obeyed, that silent East, where 
the day is born, invites us to follow the path of the 
vision, which still calls, "Come over and help us." 

To-day we stand in Paul's position, with some 
differences. We have gone so far westward that 
we again face the east. Christianity, victor at the 
gates of the sunset, now thunders at the golden 
doors of daw T n. W e are still following Columbus on 
the road to the Indies, and are demonstrating his 
theorem, if you go west far enough, you will get 
east. We propose to overtake the morning in the 
land of its birth. By invention and discovery, man 
has become ubiquitous. God has made the world 
smaller for us that we may win it the more easily. 
We, too, like Paul, are facing decadent faiths, and 
the breaking up of ancient creeds and customs. The 
great, stagnant sea of Asiatic conservatism and Af- 
rican savagery is swelled by mighty tides of influ- 



52 The; Beauty of Jesus. 



ence, and broken into majestic billows of surging 
life, and over the formless void broods the Spirit of 
God. 

Every opening door is God's call to His Church, 
and the human cry for help was never louder and 
more insistent than it is to-day. The world has 
never known a more critical moment. Not only the 
political but the moral map of the earth is rapidly 
changing. All walls are down, and the crust of 
immemorial custom breaking up. 

" Each breeze that sweep the ocean 
Brings tidings from afar 
Of nations in commotion, 
Prepared for Zion's war." 

God's call, once whispered in a vision of the 
night, now is loudly thundered by the voices of the 
day. "Come over and help us !" How shall we 
help? Not by the might of militarism or the con- 
quests of commerce, but by the sweet sovereignty 
of loving service. Whether or not we care for po- 
litical expansion and Anglo-Saxon imperialism, we 
must believe in the expansion of Christianity and 
the universal reign of the imperial Christ. For our 
noblest triumph in the Orient the gospel is greater 
than gunboats, Christian schools cheaper than sol- 
diers, and missionaries mightier than armies and 



The Macedonian Cry. 



53 



munitions of war. The millions spent in engines 
of destruction would be a thousand-fold more effect- 
ive if used to equip the armies of salvation. 

We hold a vantage-ground, not only in faith, but 
in time. We live in a missionary century. The 
nineteenth century began in skepticism. Men 
thought the French revolution had swept away the 
past and introduced a new order. Voltaire had 
prophesied the utter decay of the Christian faith. 
God answered with Wesley, Methodism, and the 
great missionary movement. The Church of Jesus 
is recovering the enthusiasm of Paul and the first 
century, and a new Knighthood of the Holy Ghost 
flings down its challenge before the champions of 
error and the strongholds of sin. 

To help the needy world is to help ourselves. 
Nothing but a world-wide gospel can save our own 
city and nation. The Holy Ghost did not allow 
Paul to stay in Asia. He was turned back from 
Bithynia. Yet it did not miss the gospel because 
Paul went west instead of east. A century later, 
and the famous Epistle of Pliny to Trajan tells the 
story of the saintly character and simple devotion 
of the Christians of Bithynia. We can not save the 
man next us, unless we can bring him a gospel 
great enough to save a world. There is no salva- 



54 Ths Beauty of Jesus. 



tion from sin that is not salvation from selfishness. 
No Church can be truly evangelistic unless it is a 
missionary spirit. To save our own land we must 
save a lost world. 

"God wills it!" So cried the crusaders as they 
assumed the cross for the rescue of the holy sepul- 
cher. "God w T ills it !" — this be our cry as we go to 
conquer, not the grave where the dead Christ lay, 
but the living world for which He died. Sin, mis- 
ery, and ignorance are God's call for help. God 
wills the salvation of this lost world. Let our 
nobler chivalry cry out, "God's will be done !" This 
holy war is the supreme test of our loyalty to the 
perfect will of our God and our faith in the coming 
of the perfect reign of His Son. There is a deep 
and beautiful lesson in the quaint conceit of Father 
Tabb: 

" A little Boy, of heavenly birth 

And far from home to-day, 
Comes down to find His ball, the earth, 

Which sin had cast away ; 
O comrades, let us, one and all, 
Join in to get him back His ball!" 



III. 



THE LORD OF LIFE. 

"Verily, verily, I say unto yon, He that heareth My 
word and believeth Him that sent Me hath eter- 
nal life and cometh not into judgment, but hath 
passed out of death into life. Verily, verily, I 
say unto yon, The hour cometh, and now is, when 
the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; 
and they that hear shall live. For as the Father 
hath life in Himself, even so gave He to the 
Son also to have life in Himself." — John v, 24- 
26, R. V. 

Jesus claims all authority for Himself on the 
ground that He is the Lord of life. He has just 
proved it by healing the impotent man at the pool 
of Bethsaida. When challenged as a breaker of the 
Sabbath He calmly sets aside the statement of the 
creation narrative, that God rested on the seventh 
day, by claiming for Himself a Divine authority 
which supersedes all instituted law. "My Father 

55 



5 6 The Beauty off Jesus. 



worketh hitherto, and I work." God is the eternal 
Worker. On the seventh day, as on the six, His 
stars keep on in their spheral march. His rivers 
dance toward the sea, and His flowers grow and 
blossom. He is not an absentee landlord, but the 
Living God, immanent in His work. He is not 
the fatalist's God who made the universe, set it go- 
ing with the clockwork of necessary laws, and stands 
aside and aloof to see it go; but He is still at work 
in deeds of creative power and redeeming love. He 
does not watch it sail by with its cargo of souls, 
but Himself trims the spars and sets the sails. He 
wears the universe as a flower upon His bosom — a 
flower which only grows from the warmth of His 
love, and whose hues are born in His heart. His 
nature is best expressed, not in mechanical terms of 
law, nor in logical terms of intellect, but in moral 
terms of life. 

And Jesus has come from God; He is the cre- 
ative norm, the beginning and the end of things. 
We can not understand the meaning of things, save 
as we see it in Him. To Him the Father has given 
to have life in Himself. Images are multiplied to 
describe this relation which He bears to God and 
also to us. "In Him was life." He calls Himself 
the "Bread of life," the "Water of life," the "Light 



Ths Lord o£ Lira. 



57 



of life," the "Way, the Truth, and the Life." "He 
that hath the Son, hath life." 

I. What is Lira? 

It is primarily a biological term, and is as in- 
definable as God. We can define mechanical things, 
but not living things; for life has a fullness that 
goes beyond speech. The swelling seed and burst- 
ing bud never quite give up their secret. They are 
but surface ripples upon an ocean of meaning which 
sweeps to the throne of the Eternal. All our defi- 
nitions leave out the very something which is the 
soul of the matter. We can not define life ; we can 
only note some of its characteristics. 

i. Life involves close correspondence with a fit- 
ting environment. 

There is a biological definition which has become 
very famous, partly through the pedantry of its lan- 
guage and partly by its acuteness. "Life is the defi- 
nite combination of heterogeneous changes, both si- 
multaneous and successive, in correspondence with 
external coexistences and sequences." So says Mr. 
Herbert Spencer, and he is very skillful, if not ex- 
haustive. He notes at least one most important 
phenomenon of life, its continuous adapation to, and 



58 The; Beauty o* Jssus. 



dependence upon, its environment. This is a neces- 
sity to every living organism. You can place a bit 
of inorganic matter, such as a stone, almost any- 
where, and it will at once establish perfect relations 
with its surroundings. It is not so with living 
things. They demand a fitting environment for their 
birth and growth. The crystal can exist anywhere, 
but the seed needs the soil, air, and sunlight for its 
well-being ; if these are wanting, it must die ; if they 
are unsuitable, it will degenerate. The grain of sand 
holds to all other particles of matter only by the 
invisible fingers of force; the living cell lays trib- 
ute upon them and transforms them into its own 
likeness and image. 

2. Life has more than physical meanings. 

It has a vast range, from the sea-ooze up to man. 
Whatever may be its validity, there is something 
sublime in the biological theory of evolution in its 
Theistic form, which sees a continuous chain from 
dust to Deity, blossoming out into saints and angels 
on the way. As life ascends, it grows constantly 
more complex, and requires a richer environment 
for its sustenance. Out yonder in the meadow is a 
great bowlder, dropped there by an iceberg of the 
primeval ocean. It feeds not on the field, and by 



The Lord oe Life. 59 



itself will neither grow nor waste. But nature has 
clothed it with gray lichens, to whom the barren 
rock and the dews of heaven give food enough for 
their feeble life. Around the rock in the rich soil 
thrive the sweet grasses and the crimson clover, de- 
manding and receiving more from nature than the 
lichens or the bowlder on which they grow. Moving 
lazily through the pasture are the mild-eyed cattle, 
who must wander widely for forage, and who add 
a life of sensuous delight to the dull, unconscious 
nutrition of the plant. The boy who drives home 
the cows at eventide has a wealth of living which in- 
cludes and goes beyond them all. He can find a 
joy in the gray and orange tinting of the rocks and 
the purple shades of twilight, and to the animal's 
life of sensation adds the larger life of thought and 
moral feeling. Each has life, but how different in 
its fullness ! Each must feed more widely than the 
forms beneath it. 

So may human beings have less or more of life. 
Some souls merely vegetate; others pass but little 
beyond animal experiences and enjoyments. How 
vastly various the surroundings demanded by dif- 
ferent natures ! The man of culture and refinement 
could not endure the sordid home of the boor, while, 
on the other hand, many a man who might surround 



6o The; Beauty of Jesus. 



himself with art, books, beauty, and luxury, has pre- 
ferred to make for himself a dismal den in the 
midst of it all that answered to his coarser need. 
All life points upward to that higher life which is 
love — love which outranks all worlds and all values. 
Love can put more meaning in a look than heaven 
can crowd into all its stars. Men can weigh suns 
and measure the vast spaces of earth and sky, but 
love can not be measured or weighed. This life 
can not find satisfaction save in God. He only who 
"placed eternity in the heart" of man can answer 
the whole hunger of the human heart. 

" What means the voice of Life ? She answers, ' I^ove !' 
For love is life, and they who do not love 
Are not alive. But every soul that loves 
Ivives in the heart of God and hears Him speak." 

3. Life is a conquering energy. 

It is very easy to believe in the triumph of death. 
The grave lies in the path of every living thing. 
Once in the British Museum I stood by the glass 
case that holds the five feet of dust supposed to be 
the mummy of Cleopatra. How strange the thought 
that in that heap of rags is folded the loveless ashes 
of a fierce fire of passion that once set the world 
aflame with war. Death rules among all the worlds ; 



The Lord of Life. 6i 

to the eye of sense, he is the mightiest of monarchs. 
In his royal treasury he has the crowns and scepters 
of the kings of earth. Death is the very masterpiece 
of evil. And so life hates death; all the horror of 
the world is there. 

" Who telleth the tale of unspeaking death, 
Who lifteth the curtain of what is to come ? 
Who painteth the shadows that flit beneath 

The wide winding shades of the peopled tomb ? 
Oi uniteth the hope of what shall be 
With the tears and love of that which we see?" 

Men have talked about the beauty of death, but 
all its beauty ends in decay. Death is discord and 
misery; life is harmony and happiness. All life is 
a glad thing, flaming in the flower, exulting in the 
bird's song, beating its wild music of passion in the 
loving heart, tasting with rapture the varied delights 
of sense and soul. Well does Browning speak of 
the "wild joys of living:" 

" How good is man's life, the mere living ! How fit to em- 
ploy 

All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!" 

As life hates death, so is it gaining on death, 
and shall conquer death. In the world of nature the 
kingdom of life is a widening dominion and death 
has no assured victory. Since the first living germ 



62 The: Beauty of Jesus. 



appeared upon the earth, vitality has been covering 
its bare skeleton of rock and sand with a robe of 
living beauty. By multiplying seeds, the meadows 
widen, the forests grow, and the race of man in- 
creases to overrun and subdue the earth. 

II. What is eternal uee? 

The phrase is almost peculiar to the fourth Gos- 
pel and the writings of John, although the idea is 
Pauline as well. It is a translation into the terms 
of universal speech of the Jewish term, "Kingdom 
of God." To say that one is born again, that he has 
eternal life, is one with the statement of the Syn- 
optic Gospels that he belongs to the kingdom of 
heaven. Life is the larger term. Mankind may 
some day develop so far politically that they may 
lose the idea of kingship; they can never lose the 
idea of life. As we speak of the vegetable and 
animal kingdoms, so may we speak of the kingdom 
of God. Its analogies are not political, but biolog- 
ical. 

i. It is a spiritual quality of being. 

What do men call life? The restless rush, the 
wild fury of passion, the feverish gayety of sensu- 
ous enjoyment, — this is what they call "seeing life." 



The: Lord of Life. 



63 



But there is another and a higher meaning possible. 
"The life is more than meat/' Eternal life is life 
that transcends the visible and perishing, and that, 
piercing the unseen, is lifted above earthly and tem- 
poral conditions. It is fellowship with the Infinite 
One. "This is life eternal, that they might know 
Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom 
Thou hast sent." It is not knowing God in any 
intellectual sense; that would only give us a hope- 
less ideal. One might as well say, "Be infinite like 
heaven, and bright like the stars." To know Jesus 
by faith is to enter a life actually lived, and yet one 
which transcends all earthliness ; it is an eternal life. 
It is found at its highest in sacrifice. The patriot, 
parent, and lover, all have known it. In that one 
transcendent moment, when self was lost in the pas- 
sion of a great devotion and self-surrender, the soul 
lived a life higher than all beating pulses or glad- 
dest sensation. Life was found in its loss. 

2. It is not a quantitative notion. 

It is not to be expressed in measures of space or 
time. It is the quality and not the amount of being 
that is significant. It does not primarily mean end- 
less life. We have too often allowed those great 
and awful symbols, "fire and brimstone/' "pearls and 



64 The Beauty of Jesus. 



gold/' to displace the deeper spiritual facts of eter- 
nal life and death. Eternal things are dateless and 
spaceless things; time and extension have nothing 
to do with them. He who is in Christ does not so 
much go to heaven as live there already. We may 
be now in the heavenly places ; the risen life is "hid 
with Christ in God." We are related to the eternal 
timeless things, such as love, purity, holiness, beauty, 
and truth. It is not more time that we need, but 
more life. More days of the same poor earthly kind 
would be but misery. Mere immortality in the sense 
of duration would be a doubtful good. We need not 
a longer but a larger life. 

" 'T is life of which our nerves are scant, 
'T is life, not death, for which we pant ; 
More life, and fuller, that we want." 

3. This life may be a present possession. 

Note the present tenses of the text and all its 
related passages. Here, and now, we may possess 
the life eternal. We do not have to die to win it ; 
it does not lie beyond that terror-haunted chasm 
we call death. We, dwellers among earthly things, 
enter by faith the eternal order. Just as a tidal river 
is visited twice daily by the swelling of the ocean, 



The Lord of Life. 65 

so these world-inclosed lives of ours can feel the 
pulse of the eternal sea. 

" Standing on tiptoe ever since my youth, 
Striving to grasp the future just above, 
I hold at length the only future — Truth ; 
And Truth is Love. 

I feel as one who, being awhile confined, 
Sees drop to dust about him all his bars ; 

The clay grows less, and leaving it, the mind 
Dwells with the stars." 

The spiritual significance of Dante's "Divine Com- 
edy" lies largely in the fact that he pictures heaven 
and hell not so much as future as present states of 
being. Many of those whom he sees in his vision 
are still living on earth. For example, he says in 
terrible words of Branca d'Oria, whom he places in 
the lowest circle of hell, "He still eats and drinks 
and w r ears clothes !" Even the pessimist Omar Kha- 
yam has enough spiritual insight to say: 

" I sent my soul into the invisible 

Some letters of that after-life to spell ; 
And by and by, my soul returned to me 
And answered, ' I myself am heaven and hell.' " 

Not hereafter, but now, may the soul touch the 
point of eternal peace, or feel the everlasting unrest. 
A lady attended by a slave-girl, while on board an 
5 



66 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



English ship, said to the captain, "If I should take 
this girl to England, she would be free." And he 
replied, "She is free now, for England is wherever 
that flag floats/' Xot in some future world of glory, 
but wherever the banner of the cross floats, souls 
who come under its folds by faith are free citizens 
of the heavenly kingdom and possessors of its eter- 
nal life. 

III. What is the source oe the eternae life? 

Life seems everywhere to be an exotic. Thus 
far the evidence of careful experiment is against 
spontaneous generation. "All life is from the germ/' 
is a fundamental maxim both of biology and the- 
ology. Chemistry may imitate the products of life, 
and by synthesis produce compounds identical with 
organic substances, but it can not produce vital phe- 
nomena. So may moral culture create conduct quite 
similar to the works of grace, but they are "dead 
works/' not implying any spiritual life. Life is al- 
ways from above, in plant, animal, man, or in the 
child of God. 

i. That which gives life must have life in itself. 

No crystal is the child of another crystal. The 
diamond, whose heart the passionate lightning has 
kissed, has only a sterile and solitary beauty ; but the 



The Lord of Life. 



67 



ugliest brown seed which holds a living germ could in 
time fill a world with flowers and fruit. A watch 
may seem more wonderful than a reptile; but how- 
ever torpid and low in type the latter may be, it 
has, what no most skillful mechanism can have, the 
power of self-renewal and reproduction. The fee- 
blest Christian in whom faith has kindled a spark 
of the Divine life is loftier in the scale of spiritual 
being than the most correct moralist. The least 
in the kingdom is greater than the noblest child of 
Law. Only God can give eternal life, for only He 
has it as an original quality of nature. Its secret 
fountain is in Him, a spring which lavishes itself 
in all the mighty streams of being. The Eternal 
Workman is forever renewing the face of the world. 

2. This eternal life is in the Son. 

"For as the Father hath life in Himself, even 
so gave He to the Son also to have life in Himself." 
"It hath pleased the Father that in Him should all 
fullness dwell." Christ is the only bridge between 
eternity and time. He is the channel through which 
the Divine love utters its fullness. His is "the 
power of an endless life." Death had no place in 
Him nor power over Him. He is as timeless and 
dateless as love and truth. We can not think of 
Him as dead; He could not be held down by any 



68 The Beauty oe Jesus. 



stone of earth. We can not look for Him in the 
grave; that would indeed be to "seek the living 
among the dead." The grave is empty, but the 
throne is full. In Him the reign of death is ended ; 
He is the "Resurrection and the Life." 

Jesus is the Life, and He gives Himself. It is 
not His example, beautiful and perfect as it is, that 
saves us. It would be mockery to send an athlete 
to a hospital just to furnish the sufferers with a 
model of what perfect health might be. He is more 
than pattern; He is power. He is more than the 
perfect example; He is the atoning sacrifice. He 
saves us, not by His possession of the fullness of 
eternal life, but by imparting it to dead souls. "The 
life I live in the flesh, I live by faith of the Son 
of God, who loved me and' gave Himself for me." 

IV. What are the results of life? 

We know life best by its products, its flowers and 
fruits. It is always mightier than mechanical forces. 
The seed lays its tribute on earth and air, and com- 
pels matter and force to obey it. Gravitation says 
to the acorn, "Keep down;" but the living germ 
•defies the force that sways the planets, moves the 
rocks in its rooting, and lifts its palace of green into 
the upper air. So the new birth puts the world 



The: Lord of Life. 



69 



under tribute; it overcomes the resistless gravitation 
that drags us to earth. "Whatsoever is born of 
God hath overcome the world." 

1. It annuls spiritual death. 

The believer in Jesus has "passed out of death 
into life." Not in the cemetery alone are the dead ; 
a living human body may be the coffin of a dead soul. 
Terrible stories have been told of men who were 
buried alive. But it is not less terrible to be buried 
intellectually, to be submerged in conditions that 
suppress the noblest possibilities; it is more awful 
still to be morally buried, and to have the God-life 
in us choked and covered with inherited tendencies, 
acquired vices, and evil habits. The natural man is 
dead to the calls and claims of the spiritual life. 
He is like a ruined and deserted temple : 

" The bat and owl inhabit there, 

The snake lies on the altar stone; 
The sacred vessels smolder near, 
The image of the God is gone." 

Regeneration is a true resurrection. Conversion 
leads to a new creation. It is no patchwork of re- 
pair, but a renewal. It is not written, "You hath He 
reformed." but "You hath He quickened." Nor is 
it culture that we need; that only makes of man a 



7o 



The: Beauty of Jesus. 



handsomer corpse. Death calls not for instruction, 
but deliverance. We need not to be taught again, 
but to be "born again." For flying we must have 
not a fatter caterpillar feeding on its cabbage-leaf, 
but a brilliant butterfly among the burning roses. 
Nor is it that correctness of outward conduct, which 
is sometimes called morality, which is implied in 
the new life. That is the cold-storage, embalmed- 
beef idea, applied to character. It preserves from 
spoiling, but it is the fixity of death. No formalism 
can simulate life; no orthodoxy can be a substitute 
for it. 

" They talk of morals, O Thou bleeding L,amb ! 
The true morality is love of Thee." 

It is not like a painted Easter-egg, inert and dead, 
but new as is the golden sunlight and pleasant air to 
the bird that has just broken the shell. 

To die with Christ is the death of death in us. 
Faith identifies the believer with the object of faith. 
This is the Pauline and Johannine doctrine of the 
mystical union and fellowship with Christ. The 
believer is crucified with Christ; it is our dead past 
that dies. The old self has had its day; surrender 
lays it in its shroud; it is gone forever, and Jesus' 
blood flows between us and our dead selves. Death 



The Lord of Life. 



7i 



can only touch dying things. Life displaces death, 
as the tender green of April crowds away the dead 
foliage of last year. Where are the dead leaves? 
Who thinks or cares about them ? They rot beneath 
your feet; they are swept away by the fresh spring 
breezes. Children of the resurrection, we "have 
passed out of death into life." 

2. It implies perpetual renewal. 

The present tenses of the blessed life are con- 
tinuous. We live, and continue to live, by union 
with the Everlasting One. Living things have the 
potency of perpetual change and growth. The dead 
rock never changes nor increases ; but the lichen 
that covers it, the eagle that builds her nest upon it, 
or the man who blasts it to discover its seams of 
gold — they live and grow. The eternal life is 
marked by newness ; it is all aglow with vivacious 
activity. "Walk in newness of life," says St. Paul. 
We have had quite enough of dead things. We will 
not haunt the tombs of its past, nor dwell in its 
graves. We are done with all business, all pleasures, 
all books and art that are touched with the taint 
of the charnel-house. Life seeks the light ; its trend 
is upward. As the seed climbs to "find a soul in 
grass and flowers," so the eternal life is forever 



72 



The: Beauty of Jesus. 



seeking higher things as it follows the path of the 
ascended Lordo 

3. It means new life for the world. 

Engineers have dreamed of flooding Sahara by 
a canal, and so to bring new life into North Central 
Africa. Such a channel is the person of our Lord, 
out of the life of God into the barren and waste life 
of man. He came into a dying world. Europe was 
slowly sinking into Asiatic stagnation. All the 
splendors of Roman power, Greek culture, and He- 
brew worship were the funeral trappings of a dying 
race. Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem were but 
mighty monuments on the tomb of humanity. The 
gospel of the resurrection brought new life to decay- 
ing society. Christianity emancipated the slave, 
elevated womanhood, protected childhood, converted 
the fierce tribes of the North, built a new world out 
of the broken fragments of Roman might, saved 
learning, baptized and recreated art, inspired music 
— in short, put a beating heart under the skeleton 
ribs of a dead world. 

There is an oft-told story of the relief of Luck- 
now which may illustrate our theme. Within the 
besieged city the English, with their women and 
children, were starving and dying. Investing them 



The: Lord of Life. 



73 



were the savage hosts of the fiendish Nana Sahib, 
more cruel than the tigers that lurked in the sur- 
rounding jungles. It was the hour of utter des- 
peration, when suddenly Jessie Brown, the corporal's 
wife, put her hand to her ear and cried: "Dinna 
ye hear it? The pipes of Havelock! The Camp- 
bells are coming !" For a long time none else could 
hear, and all thought her deluded, when at last, sure 
enough, there burst on their ears the shrill cry of 
the bagpipes, and soon the kilted Highland soldiery, 
under Havelock and Outram, entered and rescued 
the fated city from worse than death. So was the 
world beleaguered and dying. Old prophets, bend- 
ing their ears to the earth, heard the coming music 
of deliverance, until at last angel choristers sang it 
out in the midnight of the world's woe, and early in 
the morning of the earth's fairest day the Great 
Deliverer burst the gates of our bondage, and led 
the way to life. It was a flash of light flaming into 
the failing faith of mankind and into the dark king- 
doms of the dead. 

Forty days ago the sun left the winter solstice, 
and in forty days more shall touch the vernal equi- 
nox. Yet to-day, in spite of seven weeks of grow- 
ing light, the world is wrapped in winter. But no 
one doubts the triumph of the sun, and that risen 



74 



The Beauty or Jesus. 



life shall march upward from the South, pressing 
back the snowbanks and marking its footsteps with 
the violet and the rose. Are we ever disturbed be- 
cause our dead world shows so little of the effect 
of nineteen centuries of His shining? The summer- 
time of history is yet to come, and no believing soul 
doubts His final victory. 

Resurrection is the secret of Pentecost. When- 
ever the world goes back to Jesus, its failing strength 
is renewed. All revival is but fresh contact with the 
conquering and never-failing life of the everlasting 
Son of God. 

4. It secures personal immortality. 

The present possession of eternal life is the Spir- 
it's victory over physical death. Jesus has con- 
quered the grave for the believer. Death has be- 
come a negligible quantity in view of the life in 
God. YVe all have known souls of such high spir- 
itual quality that we could no more think of them 
as dead than of Jesus. Over such "death hath no 
more power.''' The last day shall ratify the verdict 
of to-day. If we could travel as fast as the sun, 
we would never know night. The man who hath 
eternal life of faith in Jesus Christ sails with the sun, 
and so outrides the darkness ; his bark at sunset sinks 
to another sea and an endless dav. 



The Lord o? Life. 



75 



"The dead shall hear the voice of the Son of 
man/' He stands among the graves, and the dust 
quivers at His call. He who has slain sin and sel- 
fishness shall slay the last enemy also. Then will 
we chant the sublimest strain of the great Te Deum : 
"When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, 
Thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all be- 
lievers. " 

Yet it is a poor blessedness that transfers all its 
hopes to that scene of future glory. Here and now, 
amid the wrecks of death, let us dare to sing the un- 
dying songs of a life transcending all our mortal 
years. Let us live in the heavenly places, rejoicing 
in every mortal pang as the dropping of the grave- 
clothes of a dying world. The resurrection light 
shines upon our very sorrows, and shows them to 
be heavenly harbingers of deathless glory. Ours 
may be the budding, blossoming life whose fair fruit- 
age awaits the resurrection of the just. 

" I long to see the hallowed earth 

In new creation rise; 
To rind the germs of Eden hid 

Where its fallen beauty lies ; 
To feel the springtide of a soul, 

By one deep love set free, 
Made meet to lay aside her dust, 

And be at home with Thee." 



76 The Beauty of Jesus. 



"The hour is coming, and now is." This moment 
is big with destiny; it throbs with resurrection 
power. O souls, dead in passion, appetite, and 
selfishness, hear ye the voice of the Son of God! 
With this gasp of your mortal breath you may in- 
hale the air of the immortal life. Believe, and thou 
shalt live ! 



IV. 



LOVE, THE INTERPRETER OF GOD. 

"He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is 
Love/' — I John iv, 8. 

It is vastly easier to affirm the negative of a prop- 
osition than to prove its affirmative. There are no 
intellectual occupations on which a man can enter 
with so small a capital, either of learning or logic, 
as skepticism and denial. It is faith, and not doubt, 
which calls for strenuous thinking and intellectual 
effort. 

Perhaps in the sense of formal proof we never 
can demonstrate the existence of God. He who 
is the sum and end of all thinking can not be 
made subject to the laws of thought. Logical proof 
is simply a process by which we assign a term to its 
proper class. The subject of the conclusion of a 
syllogism must always be a minor term. God can 
never be made a minor term; He can not be in- 
cluded in any notion larger than Himself. In the 

77 



78 The: Beauty or Jesus. 



sense of deductive logic, you can not prove His ex- 
istence. He who is the condition of all reasoning 
can not be reached by our reason. So far as we 
have a rational faith in God, it is reached by pains- 
taking and careful induction. Our intellect requires 
a God as a solution of the deepest problems of 
thought and life. It is hard to prove God, and very 
easy to deny Him. 

But positive proof has this on its side, that no 
negative can ever be proved. To assert conclusively 
that there is no God, one would need to possess some 
of the Divine attributes. The denier would have to 
be omnipresent and have explored all the depths of 
space ; he would have to be omniscient, and have 
taken all knowledge for his province, before he dare 
dogmatically exclude God from human thought. 
There may be some rational basis for agnosticism; 
there is certainly none for atheism. 

The difficulty with our knowledge of God arises 
from the subject-matter. Spiritual things must be 
spiritually discerned. We can not apply the tests of 
quantitative science to moral and spiritual phenom- 
ena. We are quite aware that all our psychic states 
are accompanied by a parallel series of physical facts. 
When we think, feel, or act, it is accompanied by 
nervous reactions and the formation and breaking 



Love, the: Interpreter oe God. 



79 



up of nerve-cells. Yet we always must draw a sharp 
line between any spiritual experience and the phys- 
ical phenomena which accompany it. Because sor- 
row produces tears, sorrow is not therefore salt 
water. 

Tears, indeed, furnish a very good illustration. 
It is not hard to explain them on their physical side. 
The chemist will tell you that they are composed 
of chloride of sodium, water and mucus ; the physi- 
ologist will explain how they are secreted from the 
arterial blood, collected in lachrymal glands, and 
their function in washing the eyeball. Yet this 
knowledge, valuable as it is, is neither exhaustive nor 
very penetrating. The poet speaks a profounder 
message when he sings in sadly sweet strains: 

" Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean ; 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
Rise from the heart and gather to the eyes, 
In looking o'er the happy autumn fields, 
And dreaming of the days that are no more." 

Yet none of these, man of science nor poet, has in- 
terpreted the crystal sphere that glitters on the 
widow's cheek, or the symboled sorrow that pours 
from the eyes of the penitent sinner. That can 
never be understood, 

" Save through the sweet philosophy 
And loving wisdom of the heart." 



So The; Beauty of Jesus. 



So it is with our knowledge of God. The rev- 
elation of His being and character can not come to 
the earthly, but to the spiritual side of our nature. 
The method of the Divine science is different from 
that of the earthly sciences. He whose nature is 
Spirit, and whose character is Love, can only be dis- 
covered by spiritual vision and known by the loving 
heart. 

I. Knowledge is incomplete without feeung. 

Nothing is more futile than knowledge in the 
mere sense of learning. A great apostle says, 
"Knowledge puffeth up, but love buildeth up." That 
is, mere knowledge makes an empty balloon of a 
man, but loves makes him into a living temple. 

I. Love is necessary to the full knowledge of 
even earthly things. 

A man of merely intellectual temperament may 
compass the dry bones of learning, he may collect 
the facts of a science, master the grammar of a lan- 
guage, or memorize a poem, and yet not realize what 
is the heart and soul of it all. Some touch of emo- 
tion or kindling of imagination are required to full 
knowledge. 

Here is one who says, "I will fie a statesman/' 



Love, the Interpreter oe God. 8i 

and so he enters upon the study of statecraft. He 
masters the social and political history of the race, 
traces the rise and fall of empires and civilizations, 
knows all about the charters and treaties which are 
the landmarks of legislation, equips himself in eco- 
nomics and sociology. It is well; but all this, and 
as much more, will not make him a statesman. When 
some crisis comes in the affairs of men and nations, 
some cause that touches the sensitive nerves of hu- 
man feelings and reaches the red-ripe of the human 
heart, unless he is capable of broad, sympathetic, 
and strongly passionate feeling, he will fail. For he 
that loveth not, knoweth not statesmanship. 

Another would be a lawyer ; he therefore studies 
the civil and common laws, the statutes of state and 
nation, the practice of tribunals of justice, and the 
precedents of courts. But in that hour, when his 
voice pleads for justice for the weak against the 
lawless spoiler, or in behalf of life itself, he will not 
be half a lawyer unless his heart shall kindle his 
brain. He that loveth not, knoweth not law. 

Still another would be a physician. He studies 
the human frame "fearfully and wonderfully made," 
its anatomy and physiology ; he investigates disease, 
its causes, symptoms, and effects; he masters the 
materia medica and the whole science of therapeutics 
6 



82 The Beauty of Jesus. 



so far as known. Yet you have known, as I once dis- 
covered, in those weary days when you lay at death's 
door, than the man and his strong, manly sympathy 
was more than all his medicine. He that loveth not, 
knoweth not medicine. 

Many a man accounted learned is really igno- 
rant of that it most behooves him to know. One of 
the meanest things ever done by a good man was the 
act of Milton, who taught his daughters to pro- 
nounce, not understand, Greek, that they might read 
to him in his blindness. And so they read hour after 
hour, to his delight, barbarous words that carried 
no meaning to their minds. Just like them is the 
undevout student of science or philosophy. He never 
masters more than the outside of truth. He alone 
truly knows the world to whom it is a spoken word 
that carries the meaning of infinite spirit. He that 
loveth not, knoweth not science. 

2. Full knowledge demands all the powers of the 
soul. 

Truth is many-sided, and needs to be approached 
from the standpoint of every faculty of the soul. To 
be a musician, there is needed more than knowledge 
of acoustics, acquaintance with musical theory and 
technical mastery of voice or instrument. Profound 



Love, the Interpreter of God. 83 

feelings to the point of passion are essential to make 
the truly great musician. 

It is this emotional part of training which is most 
neglected in modern education. Mind is cultivated 
at the expense of the soul, the head at the expense 
of the heart. Why are men ashamed of acting upon 
emotional impulse? If the feeling is a genuine and 
noble one, why not? It may err, but probably not 
more often than judgment. It is quite as important 
to learn to feel as to think, to love as to remember, 
to adore as well as to reason. All our knowledge 
without this is partial and misleading. 

3. This is especially true of the knowledge of 
God. 

That was a fine maxim of Neander, "The heart 
makes the theologian." Only through our affections 
can we find a road into the great mystery of infi- 
nite love, Pascal has thus beautifully stated it in 
one of the profoundest of his "Thoughts:" 

"It has pleased God that Divine virtues should 
not enter the heart through the understanding, but 
the understanding through the heart. For human 
things must be known to be loved, but Divine things 
must be loved to be known." 



84 The: Beauty of Jesus. 



II. The God of the Intellect. 

The intellect can not be wholly excluded from our 
religious life. It has its share in our knowledge of 
God. While none of the arguments for the being of 
God are beyond logical criticism, not one of them is 
without a large measure of validity. The under- 
standing may not disclose to us the nature of God, 
but it does assure us of the fact of His existence. 
Let us look at some of these proofs. 

I. The proof from universal consent. 

Everywhere among men exists this conviction of 
the being of Deity, a belief which is founded in our 
own personality; the voice of the Infinite within. 
Man who is himself a cause is compelled to place 
back of all the energy he sees an unconditioned will. 
Just because the only motions whose origin he knows 
begin in his personal will, he is unable to see motion 
anywhere without ascribing it to will. This belief in 
the personality of force is well-nigh universal, reach- 
ing from the superstitions of fetichism to the loftiest 
speculations of philosophy. Creation is the will, and 
the universe the act of God. Wherever light streams 
it is the sweep of His garment; all the fiery worlds 
were kindled by His touch. Motion is the thrust of 
His hand, and gravitation the weight of His finger. 



Love, the Interpreter of God, 85 

Even should the speculations of some sociologists 
be confirmed, and we should discover primitive races 
destitute of the idea of God, it would not invalidate 
the argument. There is a subtle reticence of savage 
peoples about their religious beliefs which will ac- 
count for the alleged silence in some tribes. If 
there are lowest men without the notion of Deity, 
that would only prove that the agnostic and the 
atheist have ended in the degradation and ignorance 
with which the race began. The truth would remain 
that normal man — man at his best, the humanity 
that has shaped arts and sciences, written literatures, 
and created civilizations — has always and every- 
where seen intelligence and will moving behind the 
shows of nature, and believed that the Power be-' 
hind phenomena is personal. 

2. The proof from design in nature. 

There is immanent purpose in nature. There is j 
thought in things which testifies to a thinker behind 
them. When you read a great poem like the "Para- 
dise Lost" of Milton, following its superb imagery 
and listening to the majestic music of its verse, no 
apostle of chance could convince you that an explo- 
sion in a type foundry somew T here threw letters and 
words into the ordered beauty of thought and meter. 



86 The: Bsauty of Jesus. 



When you listen to a wonderful tone-poem, like 
one of Beethoven's symphonies, played by a well- 
trained orchestra, and your soul sets out upon 

"The tides of music's golden sea 
Setting toward eternity," 

no sophistical skeptic could persuade you that a cy- 
clonic battle of the winds in the void of air or ocean 
sang its wild notes into these matchless melodies 
and heavenly harmonies. When you gaze on a poem 
in stone like St. Peter's Cathedral at Rome, where 
Michael Angelo hung the Pantheon in air in the 
glorious dome that dominates the Eternal City, could 
any one convince you that arches, pillars, carvings, 
statuary, and all that classic calm of Greek line 
touched with Renaissance feeling, were flung into 
their places by an earthquake in a stone-quarry and 
lumber-yard ? 

Even so, no chance spelled out God's poem of 
creation, written in letters of stars above and of flow- 
ers beneath; no chance sounds forth His Divine 
symphony when the fingers of the wind touch the 
lyre of the forest, and the ocean beats out his organ 
music on the rocky keyboard of the shore, keeping 
time to the martial music of the thunder ; no chance 
built His temple, tree-pillared, meadow-carpeted, and 
mountain-buttressed, whose sky dome is forever il- 



Love, the Interpreter oe God. 



87 



lumined with the burning beauty of God's holy 
lights. There is a Divine Poet in whose imagining 
all beauty was born, a Divine Musician whose are 
the harmonies of singing spheres and sounding seas, 
a Divine Architect who laid the foundations of 
heaven and earth, and reared its walls in strength 
and its spires and pinnacles in glory. To think oth- 
erwise is to bring chaos into our thought and to do 
violence to the human understanding. 

3. The proof from conscience. 

Within us we carry a testimony to the existence 
of a moral government, a higher power to which we 
are responsible. It is that "other one/' of whom 
Plato speaks whose friendship we must have to be 
at peace. The shadow of the judgment throne falls 
across the soul; it is secretly swayed by an unseen 
scepter. In the gladness of its approval, and in the 
gloom of its remorse, we see the smile and feel 
the frown of the Unseen Ruler. He who says 
"ought" has confessed God. 

4o The proof from Providence, 

Not in nature only, but in human history, 
is a Divine order. The stately steppings of a sov- 
ereign will and purpose can be seen all along the 
paths of time. 



88 The; Beauty otf Je:sus. 



III. The: God of the: He:art. 

Our greatest need is not to know that there is a 
God, but what kind of a God He is. Many thinkers, 
like John Stuart Mill, have felt the force of the ar- 
gument from design, and yet have seen in it no proof 
of the benevolence of the power that made the world. 
We want to know Him in the deeper sense of per- 
sonal acquaintance. Our heart and flesh cries out for 
the Living God. He must be to us more than a 
word in the dictionary, more than a clause in the 
creed, more than an answer in the catechism or a 
proposition in theology. The knowledge that He 
is can never fill the soul; we long for a personal 
acquaintance which shall assure use as to what 
He is. 

I. The natural man does not truly know God. 

He is not revealed to the senses. "No man hath 
seen God at any time." We can not see gravita- 
tion or hear light drop ; no more can sense percep- 
tion discover God. Lalande, the only atheistic as- 
tronomer of whom I ever heard, once said, "I have 
swept space with my telescope, and have not found 
God." He evidently thought God to be an optical 



Lo\% the Interpreter oe God. 



89 



object, to be beheld by the eye and magnified by 
lenses. But God can not be found that way. 

God is not revealed to analysis. When genius 
can be drawn out on a pair of forceps, or character 
shown on the end of a probe, when the dissecting 
scalpel can lay bare the soul, then can physical ex- 
periment find God. All in vain do we look for 
Him in the bottom of a crucible or in the smoking 
fumes of the chemical laboratory; all in vain shall 
we seek Him in the crimson dripping caves of physi- 
ology. 

God is not revealed to reason. Merely intellec- 
tual activity can not compass Him. A God who 
rested only on reason would be as worthless as a 
bloodless ghost. This is the true Christian agnos- 
ticism which cries out with Zophar: "Canst thou 
by searching find out God? Canst thou find out 
the Almighty to perfection? It is higher than 
heaven, what canst thou do ? It is deeper than hell, 
what canst thou know? The measure thereof is 
longer than the earth and broader than the sea." 

To discover God, the right instrument must be 
used. For little things we use the microscope, for 
distant things the telescope, to untwine the rays 
of light the spectroscope. But the only instrument 



go The: Beauty of Jesus. 



that can find God is the loving heart. It is better 
than the inquiring intellect or the craving imag- 
ination. 

" The mind has a thousand eyes, 
The heart but one ; 
But the light of a whole life dies 
When love is done." 

2. Life is more than logic; it is love. 

It is not from the head but the heart that flow 
the supreme issues of life. Feeling is a more sig- 
nificant fact in human nature than thought. Men 
thought one thing yesterday, and they will think 
another thing to-morrow; the philosophies of man- 
kind change with the changing generations. But 
man remains the same; he still loves and hates, his 
passionate heart has the same eternal need of loving 
as if had in the childhood of the world. Schopen- 
hauer said, "All nations have not had philosophers, 
but they have all had mothers." The greatest things 
in our life refuse to be rationalized. We can not 
and will not syllogize its sweetest and dearest ex- 
periences. Mother, wife, and child are the three 
great creeds which all true men hold without argu- 
ment and defend without apologetics. Life is al- 
ways whole and entire, while science is forever an 
imperfect thing. It is written that "we know in 



Love, the Interpreter oe God. 91 

part/' but not that we love in part. "The heart 
has reasons of its own of which the reason knows 
nothing at all." And so Tennyson sings: 

" If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, 
I heard a voice, ' Believe no more/ 
And heard an everbreaking shore 
That tumbled in a godless deep, 

A warmth within my breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part, 
And, like a man in wrath, the heart 

Stood up and answered, i I have felt.' " 

3. God is revealed to love. 

God is love, and love is something that resists 
definition. Here is a delicious dictionary attempt: 
"A feeling of strong attachment induced by that 
which delights or commands admiration." The child 
that hangs for kisses on its mother's lips knows 
more than all that platitudinous pedantry. The un- 
definable, unprovable God reveals Himself in a way 
which defies definition, and can do without it, and 
which "passeth knowledge." 

The character of God, created by His own eter- 
nal choice, is love. The sweetest passions of the hu- 
man heart, multiplied by infinity, and directed by a 
will of infinite power, — such is the God of the Bible, 
the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And because 



92 The; Beauty of Jesus. 



He is love, the road to the knowledge of Him is 
through the moral affections. Only the man with 
music in his soul can appreciate a symphony of 
Bach or Mozart; only an artistic temperament can 
enjoy a painting of Raphael or a carving of Prax- 
iteles; and even so, only the loving heart can know 
God, for God is Love. 

4. The God of the Bible is not the God of a sys- 
tem, but of life. 

We can not imprison God in the forms of human 
speech. Perhaps the most successful attempt is the 
well-known definition of the Shorter Catechism: 
"God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchange- 
able, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, 
goodness, and truth." 

There is a very good, though possibly apocryphal, 
story told concerning this definition. The commit- 
tee appointed by the Westminster Assembly to frame 
the Catechism struggled hour after hour over the 
second question, "What is God?" At last, in utter 
perplexity of mind, the chairman said to the young- 
est member of the committee, "Dr. Gillespie, lead 
us in prayer." And he prayed thus, "O God, Thou 
Spirit, infinite, unchangeable, and eternal in Thy 
being," and so on to the end; when the chairman 



Love, the Interpreter of God. 93 

said, "That will do, we have it!" Certainly there 
was never a more successful attempt made to put 
the Infinite One into the box of a definition. 

Yet the definition is harder than the thing de- 
fined. What meaning does your mind give to such 
words as "Spirit," "Infinite," and all the rest? It 
is only when we say "God is Love" that He comes 
out of the infinite depths and finds a sure dwelling- 
place in our hearts. For love defines Him in terms 
of life, and not of thought. 

5. All love is His interpreter. 

"Love is of God, and He that loveth is born of 
God, and knoweth God." All true love is a direct 
ray from His being, which, followed, will lead to 
Him. The love that croons at the cradle is one with 
that love whose impulse moves the stars. Love of 
father, mother, brother, and sister ; sweet family love, 
learned within the sacred walls of the home; love 
of friends, clasping hands in loyal amity; love of 
country, giving life itself in patriotic devotion ; love 
of humanity, that broad philanthropy that takes in 
all human kind, — all, all are steps of a ladder by 
which we ascend to the Divine love which inspired 
them all. Jesus taught us to say "Our Father," and 
Paul assures us that every fatherhood in heaven 



94 The: Beauty o£ Jesus. 



and earth gets its name from Him. Every worthy 
earthly love is a flower that has its roots in God. 
No wonder that Theodore Parker once began a 
prayer, "Our Mother, who art in heaven." He, 
Himself, has said: "Can a mother forget her suck- 
ing child, that she should not have compassion on 
the son of her womb ; yea, they may forget, yet will 
I not forget thee." Father and mother of us all, 
Brother of our humanity, Friend of sinners, Bride- 
groom and Lover of the soul, — by every tenderest 
human title of affection He makes Himself known 
to the heart that loves. 

We could not trust in loveless wisdom, even 
though it were infinite. A fiend might possess it, 
and it might be only selfish skill and conscienceless 
cunning. But this comforts, to feel that the bound- 
less skill that made the worlds and rules their des- 
tiny is wholly at the service of a love as matchless 
as is the wisdom. 

We could only shudder before the thought of Al- 
mighty Power and tremble at its thunders. To 
dream of an omnipotent demon, who hurls the ti- 
tanic forces of the universe at the bidding of will- 
ful caprice or selfish purpose, is the most awful night- 
mare that could haunt the heart. But it is rapture 
to know that boundless Power is at the service of 



Love, the Interpreter of God. 



95 



measureless love, and that there is not an energy 
in all the universe which is not the willing servant 
of our Father's love. 

" The very God ! think, Abib, dost thou think ? 
That the All-Great were the All-Loving too ! 
So through the thunder comes a human voice, 
' O heart, that I have made, a heart beats here.' " 

6. The intellect gives the form, and the heart the 
content, of the knowledge of God. 

There is matter for another sermon in that prop- 
osition. I can only state it and give a single il- 
lustration. 

Men have ever been hungrily asking, ''Who and 
what is God?" And in all their honest answers 
there has been a part of the truth. Men have built 
their conception of God as one would build a noble 
temple. 

First comes the metaphysician, and we demand : 
"O philosopher, you have probed the human rea- 
son, unraveled the intricacies of thought, and guessed 
the mysteries of mind; you know very much, — 
pray tell us what is God?" And the metaphysician 
answers, "God is unconditional will, seeing His own 
way, and having the end of His action in Himself 
alone!" A little dry and juiceless that, but it will 
do for a plan of our temple. A plan is necessary 



96 Th£ Beauty o£ Jesus. 



to all good building, though it furnishes neither 
shelter nor warmth. 

Next comes the man of science, all-knowing sci- 
ence, and we ask, "O man, wise with your messages 
from earth, sea, and air ; you have probed, analyzed, 
experimented with all things, — pray what have you 
found out about God?" And science replies, "God 
is Law." Not much food in that for a hungry 
heart ; rather the awful voice of stern necessity. Yet 
our temple must have strong foundations; let us 
undergird it with the granite of law. 

Next comes the Hebrew prophet, the light of a 
great vision glowing in his eyes, and we cry, "O 
Jew, you say you have heard God speak and claim 
possession of His oracles, — tell us what is God?" 
And the Jew responds, "God is Righteousness," and 
the voice comes through the flame of a burning 
mountain and an awful earthquake, accompanied by 
rolling thunders. How our hearts tremble at the 
tidings ; we would hide our sinful souls from the 
dread vision of His holiness. Yet in this answer our 
temple finds mighty walls and the strong thrust of 
massive buttresses. 

Now comes the Greek, with youthful grace in 
his face and the gifts of culture in his hands ; let 
us ask him, "What is God?" And the Greek an- 



Love, the Interpreter of God. 97 

swers, "God is Beauty/' There is nothing in love- 
less beauty to cheer my aching heart or cure my sin, 
yet our temple should be beautiful. Let fair fres- 
coes deck the walls, costly carvings adorn the pil- 
lars, fair arches bend above, and graceful spires 
leap like frozen fountains toward the sky. 

Now is our temple finished. Finished? Yes, 
and no. Its form is there, grand in united strength 
and beauty, but it is cold and empty. As we walk 
down the vacant aisles, our hearts freeze in the chill 
air, and the echo of our footfalls strikes a lonely 
dread into the spirit. Still we cry out for the living 
God. 

It was in the holy Judean twilight. The beloved 
disciple was leaning on the bosom of Jesus, hearing 
the throbbing of the greatest heart that ever beat 
and broke for men, looking into the tenderest eyes 
that ever glowed with the light of love, and listening 
to the gracious lips that spoke the sweetest messages 
whose music ever blessed mortal ears. There was a 
hush of sacred silence, and John whispered, "My 
Master, tell me, who and what is God ?" And then 
the heart beat more warmly, and the eyes looked 
more tenderly, and the lips spoke more softly, as 
Jesus said, "My beloved, God is Love." Our tem- 
ple is empty and lonely no longer ; for, at that word, 
7 



98 The: Beauty otf Jesus. 



through the long aisles and up to the vaulted roof 
bursts the anthem of redemption, and on the altar 
blazes the Shekinah of the living Presence. 

Love finds God; He can not hide Himself from 
the search of the loving heart. "Love will find out 
the way/' — such is the moral of one of the sweetest 
love stories that has come down to us from the 
Middle Ages. Gilbert a Becket, a citizen of Lon- 
don, was a prisoner in the tent of a noble Saracen 
in one of the Crusades. While there, love sprang up 
between the hearts of the fair-haired Saxon and a 
dark-eyed daughter of the desert. When he was at 
last released and returned to his home, the lonely 
maiden pined for her Western lover, and, leaving 
her home, she followed him. She knew but two 
English words, "London" and "Gilbert." By re- 
peating the first she found her way to the sea, then 
into the high-masted ship, and, after awhile, in the 
streets of the far-off city. Then she began to say 
"Gilbert," as she passed from street to street. The 
curious crowd followed her, until one day, Gilbert 
a Becket, attracted by it and drawing near, found 
his lost love from the Orient. From that marriage 
sprang the great family of a Becket. So was He, 
the heavenly Lover of the soul, with us on a more 
knightly quest than ever fired a Crusader's heart. 



Love, the: Interpreter of God. 99 

A prisoner in the tents of earth, He won our souls to 
passionate devotion. And now that He has gone to 
prepare a place for His Bride, she, speaking the 
words, "Jesus! Heaven !" shall not fail to find "the 
King in His beauty and the land which is very far 
off." Love will find out the way. So the old ballad 
goes: 

" Over the mountains, 

And over the waves ; 
Under the fountains, 

And under the caves ; 
Through floods that are deepest, 
O'er rocks that are steepest, 

Love will find out the way." 

Nothing can stand in the way of love. Having 

conquered sin and doubt, sorrow and despair, it shall 

conquer death also. "Many waters can not quench 

love, neither can the floods drown it. Love is strong 

as death." 

" Sink down, ye separating hills, 
Let sin and death remove ; 
'T is love that drives my chariot wheels. 
And death must yield to love." 



LofC. 



V. 



HARDENING THE HEART. 

"And Pharaoh hardened his heart." — Ex. viii, 32. 
"And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh" — 
Ex. ix, 12. 

"Pharaoh hardened his heart;" "The Lord 
hardened the heart of Pharaoh/' — is not that a pal- 
pable contradiction in terms? It could not have 
seemed so to the writer, for on any theory of author- 
ship the same pen recorded both statements. In his 
mind there was certainly some solution of the prob- 
lem, some reconciliation of the free agency of Pha- 
raoh and the judicial act of Jehovah. 

"Pharaoh hardened his heart." We have no 
difficulty in believing that statement. We have done 
the like ourselves; we, too, like the stubborn Egyp- 
tian king, have waged our losing warfare against 
the will of our God ; we, too, by repeated rebellions, 
have made our hearts well-nigh callous to His touch. 

It is the second text, "The Lord hardened the 
100 



Hardening the Heart. 



ioi 



heart of Pharaoh/' that shocks our sensibilities and 
puzzles our reason. Can we believe it? One thing 
is certain, in any real battle between the instincts 
of human justice and the forms of human language, 
though the words were found in the most sacred of 
records, language must go down before that imperial 
sense of right which the divinest of revelations 
speaks in the human conscience. If we had to be- 
lieve that any sovereign act of God arbitrarily ex- 
cluded any soul from righteous choices, our faith 
in the whole moral order would be shaken. Then, 
indeed, "this pillared firmament were rottenness." 

Is there necessarily any contradiction? It is 
worth our notice that no less than three words in 
the Hebrew original text are rendered "harden" in 
our English version. It would involve a too pedan- 
tic nicety to argue this point at any length; it is 
sufficient to note that, in the very language used 
by the recorder of this ancient story of doom, it is 
implied that there is a difference in character be- 
tween the human and the Divine act of hardening; 
that God does not and will not harden a human 
heart in the same awful sense in which we may and 
do harden our own hearts against Him. God does 
not debauch the will of man, or infuse evil passions 
into his heart. Pharaoh w T as not the blind agent of 



io2 The: Beauty of Jesus. 



some unpitying and arbitrary fate. We rest secure, 
on the basis of the very language used, that there 
is nothing in the narrative which need awaken 
doubts of the Divine justice or disturb our faith in 
the moral order of the world. 

The case of Pharaoh is simply one picture out 
of thousands of the eternal struggle between the 
will of God and that of man. Somewhere, at the 
parting of the ways, every soul comes to the same 
crisis, to that valley of decision where, in the mys- 
tery of Choice, is sown the seed of character. In the 
narrative of Exodus, God is defeated in the field of 
the human will, but gloriously triumphant in the is- 
sue of the history. For the defeat of God is always 
and everywhere the most fearful defeat of man. 

" For he that shuts out Iyove, in turn shall be 
Shut out by Love, and on her threshold lie 
Howling in outer darkness. Not for this 
Was common clay ta'en from the common earth, 
Molded by God, and tempered with the tears 
Of angel, to the perfect shape of man." 

Thus the case of Pharaoh has become typical. 
His is a shining shame that glows luridly for us 
across more than thirty centuries. He stands in the 
like awful doom with others, Esau, Saul, Judas, and 
millions since, who have broken their lives like waves 
against the granite strength of righteous law. It 



Hardening the Heart. 103 



did not happen three millenniums ago. It happened 
yesterday, here, in our own city ; it may be happen- 
ing in this house of God to-day. 

I. Man may harden his own heart against the 
wiu, of God. 

In the context, the hardening is ascribed to Pha- 
raoh again and again. He, himself, was under no 
delusion as to the point of personal responsibility. 
He confesses in seeming contrition to the prophet of 
God, "I have sinned against the Lord your God and 
you ;" and again, "The Lord is righteous, and I and 
my people are wicked. 7 ' Indeed, we can determine 
the exact period when the walls of doom begin to 
close in upon the stubborn tyrant. It is exactly in 
the middle of the ten plagues. Five awful warnings 
have spent their force in vain, and the language is 
altered. Judicial blindness has set in ; and it is now 
that we begin to meet the phrase, "The Lord hard- 
ened the heart of Pharaoh." It is simply the com- 
mon enough case of a self-induced callousness which 
ends in a blind and reckless infatuation. 

1. We mark for ourselves the limits of the Di- 
vine mercy. 

No man is shut out from the grace of God by 
the act of God. For His mercy has no limit, nor His 



io4 The Beauty of Jesus. 



justice, nor His love. In the sublime statement of 
Genesis, "In the image of God made He man," we 
catch a glimpse of that which is at once the glory 
and the peril of our nature. Man has been crowned 
with glory and honor, and given a share in the 
moral sovereignty of the world. 

" Thought, conscience, will, — to make them all thine own, 
He tore a pillar from the Eternal Throne ; 
Made in His image, thou mayest nobly dare 
The thorny crown of sovereignty to wear ; 
Honor thy station, prove thy high estate, — 
Thou hast a choice, to choose is to create." 

This freedom involves the possibility of sin. Sin 
is the abuse of freedom, the self-choice of the will. 
This domain of choice God will not invade. He 
everywhere and always by His law co-operates with 
human volition. He shares dominion with His crea- 
tures. It is at this cost to Himself that God creates 
a moral empire; and who shall say that it is not 
worth the sacrifice ? What we choose for ourselves, 
the justice and the goodness of God will at last 
dhoose for us. There is no one of His good gifts 
that we have not the power to turn into a curse. 
Fire, water, light, food, and air are blessing or bane 
according to our act ; all were good in the thought of 
the Heavenly Father. Nature has her Athanasian 



Hardening the; Heart. 105 



Creed not less strict than that of the Church, and she 
never repeals the damnatory clauses. If anywhere, 
in grace or nature, a door is shut that leads to good, 
the hand of man, not that of God, has closed it. 

2. The penaly for sin is self-wrought. 

Sin is the penalty of sin. The most terrible re- 
sult of our transgression is in the fact that sin in- 
volves more sin. Sin punishes itself. "Of our pleas- 
ant sins God makes whips to scourge us." Punish- 
ment in the government of God is not a capricious 
and arbitrary thing, but logical and natural, the in- 
evitable outcome of the sin itself. It is not some 
measured quantum placed over against each wicked 
deed. Sin itself is torment, and has an awful fruit- 
age in further evil and deeper woe. 

The men of genius who have seen most deeply 
into the moral problems of life have always discerned 
this. The circling hells of Dante's Inferno are 
shaped wholly of a spiritual symbolism, in which 
each offender finds a woe his sin has helped to cre- 
ate — a strange outward picture of the inward crime. 
Hawthorne's monomaniac who carries the snake in 
his heart and cries, "It gnaws me !" and his Arthur 
Dimmesdale, who wears unseen the Scarlet Letter 
on his breast, — all are symbols of this terrible power 



io6 The: Beauty of Jesus. 



of God's law to execute itself upon the sinner. The 
same lesson is taught by the weird story of "The 
Ancient Mariner/' who, having slain the albatross, 
which the sailors thought the harbinger of favorable 
winds, is condemned to wear the dead bird about his 
neck in punishment of his crime. How true it is 
to all human experience ! The lustful man shall see 
all true love blighted and all shapes of beauty defiled 
to his vile vision ; his own passions shall become his 
torment. The covetous man shall become the slave 
of his own selfishness, and the passionate the prey 
of their own untamable desires. 

Not out of the judgments of a mighty God, but 
out of the sinful heart of man, is hell born. Sin 
makes hell. Its deep foundations are laid in rebel- 
lious will; its adamantine walls are built of selfish 
choices ; its flames are the burning, raging passions 
of men; and the never-dying worm, which forever 
feeds upon the unconsumed being, is the aching 
sense of a lost purity, the heart's need of a love which 
only the God it has rejected can supply. Where sin 
is, there hell is. If you should take the fairest star 
that floats on the azure sea above us and fill it with 
sinners, it would become a hell. If God should robe 
the sinner in white, put the crown on his head and 
the harp in his hand, and then place him in the flow- 



Hardening the; Heart. 107 



ery fields of heaven, so long as sin remained in his 
heart he would be distant by all the infinite diameter 
of being from the nearest angel. All the power of 
the eternal God can not take the sinner out of hell 
while he remains a sinner, for sin makes hell. Our 
punishment is self-wrought. God save us from 
ourselves! We carry the seeds of hell within us. 
Man hardens his own heart. 

II. What part has God in hardening the 
heart ? 

We begin to see in what sense it can be affirmed 
of God that He hardens the heart. Just because this 
hardening is a necessity of the moral nature of man, 
it is a law of the moral government of God. 

1. It is involved in the natural and necessary op- 
eration of His laws. 

We see this most clearly in the law of habit, on 
which the formation of character depends. It is a 
process by which voluntary and free actions grad- 
ually become involuntary and necessary. Act is al- 
ways ripening into state, conduct creates character, 
and deed develops into destiny. This law lies at the 
foundation of all education and training. The il- 
lustrations are everywhere. Let us note a few. 



io8 The; Beauty otf Jesus. 



I can not commonly get thus far in a sermon 
without some blunder in speech. It is no more possi- 
ble for me to use "shall" and "will" properly, without 
thought, than it is for Scotchmen generally. Is it 
because I do not know the rules of grammar and 
rhetoric? By no means; it simply is because I 
learned to talk before the grammar man caught me. 
Certain tricks of speech have become second nature 
which no precept can destroy. 

Have you ever reflected what a curiously-com- 
plicated process is the learning of any difficult art, 
such as music ? To the uninitiated, nothing is more 
mysterious than a musical score ; the lines and spaces, 
the strange black dots, the elaborate symbolism to 
represent melody, harmony, and rhythm. Think of 
the tedious years of training before the artist can 
readily reproduce it on the keyboard of the piano. 
How awkward were the first movements, how con- 
scious the processes by which the eye noted the 
score, and then the fingers patiently felt for the 
proper keys! But the artist knows no such diffi- 
culty. His eyes and muscles have a memory and 
volition of their own, with which conscious thought 
and will have nothing to do. The score passes 
to the eyes, and from the educated finger-tips finds 
its way to the chords, where it is transformed into 



Hardening the Heart. 109 

garlands of melody and harmony for the delight 
of all who hear. Were it not possible to keep con- 
sciously willing until, at last, will was lost in habit, 
no training in art or morals would be possible. 

Mr. Huxley gives a fine illustration of this law 
in one of his "Lay Sermons." A day laborer in 
London had been, for many years before, a com- 
mon soldier in the army. The discipline and drill 
of the camp and field had become of the very fiber 
of his physical being. One day, while going to his 
work with his dinner in his hand, a former officer, 
seeing and recognizing him, called out, "Attention !" 
At once the man stood at attention, his dinner went 
into the ditch and his little finger to the seam of his 
trousers. So has many a man drilled so long in the 
ranks of sin that at every order of the dark De- 
stroyer he stands obedient, while the treasures of his 
nature go down into mire and filth. 

And this is, in a very profound sense, the act of 
God — this crystallization of choice into soul tissue 
and spiritual fiber. His law, which is His will in 
action, takes up our acts, our thoughts, our feel- 
ings, and welds them into that lasting structure we 
call character. It works towards holiness as truly 
as toward an evil destiny. There are men in this 
congregation to whom a dishonorable thought or 



no The: Beauty of Jesus. 



act has become so difficult as to be well-nigh impos- 
sible. The truth is so instinctive to them that, like 
the youthful Washington, they "can not tell a lie." 
There are thousands of women to whom an unchaste 
thought or act is as remote as from God's whitest 
angel. 

The same law that builds the brazen walls of 
perdition, rears the high walls of beauty that shut the 
holy into heaven. "Character," says Novalis, "is 
organized will." 

Such is the sense in which man's sinful choices 
become themselves a part of the judicial sentence of 
God, and the hardening of heart wrought by man's 
willfulness is seen to be secured as by Divine decree. 

" Never let man be bold enough to say, 
Thus and no farther shall my passion stray ; 
The first crime passed, compels us on to more, 
And guilt proves fate, which was but choice before." 

Say, "I will not," often enough to God, and it will 
become, "I can not." 

2. This process is gracious as well as judicial. 

Men are hardened by the very influences meant to 
convince and save them. It is God's gifts that be- 
come our doom. Abused mercy turns into wrath. 



Hardening the Heart. 



hi 



God was as willing to spare Egypt as to deliver 
Israel. By many and varied influences, by sign and 
miracle, by prophetic warning and entreaty, by doom 
following upon doom like successive crashes of thun- 
der, by the suffering of His people, God sought to 
persuade the willful king. Calamity is often the 
voice of God that warns against more deadly peril. 
Pain is a sentinel that stands like an angel with the 
drawn sword, guarding, not the way to life, but to 
death. Law is highest love. An apostle of the New 
Testament links in one breath "the goodness and the 
severity of God." Henrik Ibsen puts these great 
words into the mouth of his hero Brand : 

"If day by day passes in drowsy peace, at a walk- 
ing pace, like a funeral, then a man may well think 
that he is struck out of the Lord's book. But to you 
He has shown more favor; He has shed horror 
into your blood; He has scourged you with a whip 
at the time of need ; what He gave, at a dear price 
He has taken again. A living people sucks sorrow 
and strength out of affliction." 

God afflicts in mercy. He is honest with our 
souls at the expense of our bodies. He will not 
leave us to the deeper misery of forgetting Him, 
although ten plagues are needed to remind us. The 



112 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



justice of God must not be separated from His 
mercy. Popular sentimentalism is too prone to mis- 
take mercy for moral weakness and easy good na- 
ture. To believe in a love not rooted in righteous- 
ness is to believe in a love not strong enough to save. 
The love that will not punish can not redeem. For 
mercy is a robust and stalwart thing, else we could 
not trust it. Behind every judgment beats the heart 
of the Infinite tenderness. The sun which clothes 
one tree withers and blasts another. The heat that 
melts the wax hardens the clay. Mercy, — she too, 
like Justice, stands with the poised scales and the 
drawn sword. To save the sheep, she will slay the 
wolves; she will stamp out the serpents about her 
children's cradle. 

3. This interaction of human will and the Di- 
vine law in the process of hardening illustrates and 
vindicates the Sovereignty of God. 

Pharaoh had his way, but so God was all the 
more triumphant. All his delays and denials, all 
his parleyings and postponements, only made the 
victory of Jehovah and His people more splendid. 
That night of the Exodus stood forever marked in 
Hebrew history as the true birth-hour of the nation. 



Hardening the Heart. 113 



"With a 'high hand and a stretched-out arm/' Jeho- 
vah went before them in the flame and behind them 
in the cloud, while under the full passover moon, 
and through the flying foam flung from the lips of 
the east wind, Israel marched dry-shod, leaving, as 
the cleft waves closed in, the hosts of Egypt to be 
tossed in the trough of the sea and be rolled pale 
corpses on either shore, while on the farther banks 
of a great deliverance the redeemed bondmen chant 
their psalm in triumph: 

" Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea; 
Jehovah hath triumphed, His people are free." 

All human willfulness is but an added note of 
emphasis to the will of God, And this is the word of 
the Lord unto Pharaoh, and to all stout-hearted 
rebels against His law : "Even for this same pur- 
pose have I raised thee up, that I might show My 
power in thee, and that My name might be declared 
through all the earth." Centuries later the most 
penetrating spiritual insight that ever saw into the 
soul of Hebrew history, thinking of this very case, 
exclaimed : 

"What if God, willing to show His wrath, and 
to make His power known, endured with much long- 
8 



The: Beauty oe Jesus. 



suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction ; 
and that He might make known the riches of His 
glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had afore 
prepared unto glory ?" 

There is in this none of the capricious arbitrari- 
ness of the Pagan proverb, "Whom the gods wish 
to destroy, they first make mad." The greater fact 
is, that in the sphere of human life and history men 
supply the conditions and materials with which Di- 
vine providence works. God is to us what we are to 
God. His absolute sovereignty takes up all human 
choices and deeds into the warp and woof of His 
eternal purpose. The splendid web of His perfect 
rule is woven of the mingled threads of good and 
evil furnished by earthly lives. God will rule the 
world in spite of — yes, and by means of — disobedi- 
ence and sin. "He maketh the wrath of man to 
praise Him." Our self-will can not dethrone the 
eternal King. A Swedish proverb says, "He that 
will not be ruled by the rudder must be ruled by 
the rocks." 

You have heard some true master improvising 
upon the grand organ. At first he began with his 
theme, a beautiful melody, rendered very simply 
with rich, full harmonies. Then he began to let his 



Hardening the Heart. 



115 



fancy play with it, and you heard the lovely air pass 
through endless inversions and variations, until its 
sweet simplicity was enriched with a most luxuriant 
embroidery of sound. Then minor modulations 
crept in, until, suddenly, you hear an awful crash, 
a veritable discord, and you cry, "That is not music." 
If it stopped there, it would not be music. Listen 
further, and you shall hear the diminished inter- 
vals of the dissonance widen into euphony, until, 
at the last, the player's theme reappears in a glad 
burst of major melody. The hands of the Almighty 
Master are on the keyboard of life, and, whatever 
discords man may make, He knows how to resolve 
them all into His majestic harmony. The thought 
and theme of the Master shall triumph in spite of 
all the dissonance of rebellious wills and lives. 

III. Let us study the gradual process oE hard- 
ening. 

It is not usually all done at once. There may, 
occasionally, be a choice so critical, so willful, and 
in the face of such a blaze of light, that it consum- 
mates, once for all, the suicide of a soul. The 
whole moral nature may be so involved in one de- 
termined rejection of God that the man consciously 



n6 The Beauty of Jesus. 

shuts the gate of opportunity with a jar that makes 
Heaven shudder and sends a fresh pang to the 
wounded heart of Jesus Christ. But it is not com- 
monly so. This Pharaoh was doubtless once a 
thoughtless boy, possibly with a boy's dreams and 
ideals of a noble and useful reign. Who knows 
what story of faithlessness to many a worthy pur- 
pose, wise counsel, and heavenly influence lay back 
of the fateful choice which at last sealed his doom? 
Over the wayside path there had passed more than 
one dray of business and chariot of pleasure before 
the hardened soil rejected the living seed that fell 
from the Sower's hand. 

I. Trend of character is easily established. 

All acts become easier by repetition. This is 
true, not only of the organism through which we 
act, but of the conscious life behind it. Disobedi- 
ence darkens, obedience illumines the soul. We talk 
much in these days of heredity and environment; 
and these factors are indeed important in the shap- 
ing of our lives. But they are all less potent than 
the acquired factors created by the human will. We 
are not the playthings of fate, the slaves of neces- 
sity, the creatures of circumstance; we are respon- 
sible for our lives. The direst necessity that can 



Hardening the; Heart. 



117 



control us is of our own creation, either an angel 
of goodness we have formed through holy choices, 
or an awful Frankenstein we shape within the breast 
for our own undoing. 

" Man is his own star, and the soul who can 
Render an honest and a perfect man 
Commands all light, all influence, all fate ; 
Nothing to him falls early or too late ; 
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. 

2. There is a pristine parity we do well to guard. 

The budding life of youth has a flexibility that be- 
longs to no later period. There is a plasticity of 
soul easily fashioned for good or evil, a freshness 
of heart easily lost. The young do well to guard 
this morning dew, this spring bloom of their na- 
ture. Jesus taught us that the little children, and 
those like them, are in the kingdom of heaven. As 
in the exquisite image of Thomas Middleton, 

" Upon those lips the sweet fresh buds of youth, 
The holy dew of prayer lies, like a pearl 
Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn 
Upon a bashful rose." 

Ah ! I have seen a rose, the garden's queen, the 
dewdrops trembling on its lips in the fresh June 
dawn, but before midnight it had blushed on the 



Ii8 



The: Beauty of Jesus. 



bosom of beauty, to be cast away a soiled and with- 
ered thing. I have seen the butterfly, with all the iri- 
descent glories of the rainbow on its wings, clutched 
by a boy's rude hand, who, at one coarse touch, 
destroyed more loveliness than all his life shall 
create. I have seen the frost pictures on the win- 
dow-pane, delicate traceries of leaves and ferns, as 
though the ghosts of dead summer had laid their 
cheeks there in the frosty night; but before noon 
the heat, the touch of baby's fingers, had destroyed 
it all, and it melted away in great tears, as if na- 
ture were weeping at the loss of so much loveli- 
ness. There is something sadder than that : I have 
known a soul, as fair and fragrant as the rose, as 
glittering in promise as the butterfly's wings, as ex- 
quisite in its innocence and possible purity as the 
etching of the frost, — and the soil of sin, the clutch 
of selfishness, and the heat of passion have robbed 
it of its first grace, and left it withered, marred, and 
ruined. 

3. Willful sin becomes a compelling power in 
life. 

The sin which was ours becomes, as it were, an 
alien power over our lives. It was the creature of 
our choice, but has now become a thing external 



Hardening the Heart. 119 

to our wills. As Euripides exclaims in Medea, "Lust 
is mightier than all my determinations." Perhaps 
the most tremendous picture of this in all litera- 
ture is that given by Shakespeare in Macbeth. The 
murder of Duncan has been fully planned, and the 
crime is complete so far as the will of Macbeth is 
concerned. And so complete is it that the dark deed 
has become a thing external to him, leading and 
compelling him on. It is visualized to his guilty 
conscience as a floating dagger in the air. 

" Is this a dagger that I see before me, 
The handle toward my hand ? Come, let me clutch thee ; 
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. 
Art thou but . . . 
A dagger of the mind, a false creation 
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain ? 
Thou marshalest me the way that I was going. 13 

A lesser literary artist would have written a am 
going." But our great English master knew better. 
He knew that the heart may be so set to do evil, 
that even future sin dwells there as a finished thing ; 
sin has become lord of life. 

4. This involves the possibility of lost spiritual 
faculty. 

At last comes the blighting of power; spiritual 
paralysis seizes the nature; judicial blindness set- 



120 



The: Beauty oe Jesus. 



ties down upon the soul. "Sin, when it is finished, 
bringeth forth death." Conscience is silent, good- 
ness trampled under foot, principle turned into pol- 
icy and truth into falsehood. Joy folds her wings 
and dies, faith becomes blind, hope snaps her anchor 
and is adrift, and love is frozen in the chill em- 
brace of selfishness. 

The great Napoleon is the grand historical exam- 
ple of the blindness that may follow selfish choices. 
As long as the mighty conqueror was the incarnation 
of democracy, the champion of the rights of the 
comman man, so long he was victorious everywhere. 
But when the passion for freedom gave way to 
dreams of imperial splendor, when at the sacrifice of 
love, honor, and justice, he would at any cost found a 
dynasty, with the moral decline the man became 
the dupe of his own deceptions. In breach of sworn 
faith, against the judgment of his wisest counselors, 
repelling the pleadings of Eugene, and of the only 
person he ever really loved, his brother Joseph, he 
entered upon the fatal Russian campaign; and on 
one awful night, with the flames of burning Mos- 
cow for a pencil, God wrote upon the skyey pave- 
ments of heaven the eternal doom of the hardened 
victim of unrestrained self-will. "God shall send 



Hardening the; Heart. 



121 



them a strong delusion, that they should believe a 
lie." 

"And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest 
them that do such things, and doest the same, that 
thou shalt escape the judgment of God? Or de- 
spisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbear- 
ance and longsuffering, not knowing that the good- 
ness of God leadeth thee to repentance ? But, after 
thy hardness and impenitent heart, treasurest up 
wrath against the day of wrath, and revelation of 
the righteous judgment of God." 

A dead man lies in yonder room, facing the east. 
The morning sun may lay its light across his face, 
but the eyes shall no more open to the day; the 
morning bells shall not arouse him, nor the prattle 
of little children on the stairway either disturb or 
gladden him. The tumult of traffic may awaken in 
the busy street; but he no more shall fling his en- 
ergies into the strenuous tide of toil. Yonder is a 
man in whose living body the spiritual nature lies 
dead; his moral being is a corpse. The dawning 
light of God's grace gives no pleasure to his inward 
vision; the bells of gospel invitation, the joyous 
shouts of redeemed souls, the stirring activities of 
the spiritual world all about him, — none of these 



122 



The: Beauty oe Jesus. 



awaken response in the reprobate heart. "Ephraim 
is joined to his idols, let him alone.'' 

"There is a line, by us unseen, 
That crosses every path, 
That marks the boundary between 
God's patience and His wrath ; 

To pass that limit is to die, 

To die as if by stealth ; 
It does not quench the beaming eye, 

Nor pale the glow of health. 

O, where is that mysterious bourne, 

By which our path is crossed, 
Beyond which God Himself hath sworn 

That he who goes is lost?" 

In one of his most respulsive stories, Zola has 
furnished a terrible illustration. A loaded train of 
drunken, shouting, singing soldiers has pulled out 
of a Paris railway station, bound for the front, in 
the Franco-Prussian war. The engineer and fire- 
man are enemies. At last a vile word of insult 
passes between them, and they grapple in a death 
struggle that only ends as one draws the other with 
him through the cab window, to be crushed beneath 
the rolling wheels of the engine they were driving. 
The boilers are full, the furnace is stoked, the throt- 
tle-valve is open, and forward into the night rolls 
the living freight of souls, wild with the excitement 



Hardening ths Heart. 



123 



cf war and the mad delirium of drink, — on, on, to 
horrible and inevitable doom! Every one of us is 
like that train, with a horde of fierce passions and 
wild desires aboard. If only we can keep will and 
conscience alive, we can bring our hazardous freight 
safely through, and it shall become an army to fight 
for God. But if will is paralyzed and conscience 
drugged, there remains only "a certain fearful look- 
ing for of judgment and fiery indignation that shall 
devour the adversaries." 

Does God harden a human heart ? Certainly not 
in any sense that puts any but a loving, saving in- 
tent in His every act of will toward us. The words 
of the Quaker poet are as true as they are beautiful : 

" I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air : 
I only know I can not drift 
Beyond His love and care. 

And so beside the silent sea, 

I wait the muffled oar; 
No harm from Him can come to me 

On ocean or on shore." 

"I can not drift beyond His love;" "No harm 
from Him can come to me/' — how often that has 
been quoted in Universalist pulpits ! Whittier feared 
that it might be so used by souls who would reck- 



124 The Beauty of Jesus. 

lessly presume upon the Divine mercy ; and therefore 
he wrote the "Answer :" 

" Though God be good and free be heaven, 
No force Divine can love compel ; 
And though the song of sins forgiven 
Many sound through lowest hell, 

The sweet persuasion of His voice 

Respects thy sanctity of will. 
He giveth day : thou hast thy choice 

To walk in darkness still. 

Forever round the mercy-seat 

The guiding lights of love shall burn ; 

But what if, habit-bound, thy feet 
Shall lack the will to turn ? 

What if thine eye refuse to see, 

Thine ear of heaven's free welcome fail, 

And thou a willing captive be, 
Thyself thy own dark jail?" 

We do well to cherish all Godward tendencies, 
to make the most of the tides of the soul. I saw a 
great ocean liner, the St. Louis, on the sands near 
Long Branch. For days the tugs labored to puil 
her off. The effort was always made at the time 
of high tide. Every tide missed, created more in- 
tense anxiety; for all knew that the very swell of 
ocean that might bear the ship to safety, if 
unused, only buried her more deeply in the sands. 
There are high tides of spiritual opportunity, when 



Hardening the Heart. 125 

the attraction of heavenly influences makes the whole 
human sea swell toward the skies. It may be high 
tide with some soul here, this hour. O, soul, soul, 
go out to sea! While wave on wave the rising 
tides of grace come welling- in from God and cover 
the sands of sin, let us float on the full flood of sal- 
vation out upon the boundless ocean of Jesus' love. 
Let no ebbing tide leave you deeper in the smoth- 
ering sands of obdurate self-will. Perhaps before 
another springtide has come, the tempests of trouble 
and wrath shall break the soul's bark into wreck- 
age. Forever flow the tides of grace ; but what serve 
they to the wrecked soul? 

" O come, sinner, come, for the tide is receding, 
And the Savior will soon and forever cease pleading." 

"To-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not 
your hearts." 



VI. 



MARCHING TO MUSIC. 

"Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of 
my pilgrimage " — Psa. cxix, 54. 

The: literary structure of this one hundred and 
nineteenth Psalm is exceedingly artificial. It is an 
ode in praise of the law of God, which runs through 
twenty-two strophes of eight verses each. It is also 
an alphabetical acrostic, each one of each set of eight 
verses in order, beginning with the corresponding 
letter of the Hebrew alphabet. You would think 
that such a poem is very mechanical indeed, and 
utterly devoid of life and spontaneity. Yet the case 
is quite otherwise; the monotonous music is ad- 
mirably adapted to preserve the insistent keynote 
of law, law, law, whose praises run through all pos- 
sible scales of varied melody. 

The passionate prelude of the first Psalm which 
sings the blessedness of the righteous man, whose 

126 



Marching to Music. 



127 



"delight is in the law of Jehovah/' here rises to a 
high sustained symphony. Meditation day and night 
upon His law has set itself to music, and the stat- 
utes of God have become the marching song of the 
weary pilgrims of earth. The one hundred and 
nineteenth Psalm is the full blossom of the germ 
planted in the first. 

Not that the music is unmarred by discordant 
notes ; quite otherwise. Minor modulations come 
in. "Horror hath taken hold of me because of the 
wicked that forsake Thy law." But again and again 
the dissonance of earth rises only to be drowned 
by heavenly harmonics. The horror of the world's 
wickedness is relieved by a strain of melody out of 
the heart of God. Above all confusion of time 
broods the music of eternal order, and it is possible 
for our lives to keep step, not to the broken noises 
of earth, but to the rhythm of the Divine Law. 

" My life flows on in endless song ; 

Above earth'sjjlamentation, 
I catch the sweet though far-off hymn 

That hails a new creation ; 
Through all the tumult and the strife 

I hear the music ringing ; 
It finds an echo in my life, — 

How can I keep from singing?" 



i28 The; Beauty of Jesus. 



I. The Pilgrim oe Earth may sing songs oe 
Heaven. 

This conception of life as a pilgrimage was never 
quite absent from the Hebrew heart. It was born, 
doubtless, of the old nomad life, which lived in tra- 
dition as the romantic background of its history. 
The patriarchal heroes of the race, Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob, had been dwellers in tents, and had wan- 
dered from place to place, "confessing that they were 
strangers and pilgrims on the earth/' The com- 
mon ancestor, Israel, sorrowfully spoke to Pharaoh 
of "the days of the years of my pilgrimage," and 
every devout Israelite adopted the same plaintive 
refrain: "For I am a stranger with thee and a so- 
journer, as all my fathers were." And David also 
sang, "We are strangers before Thee and sojourn- 
ers, as were all our fathers; our days on the earth 
are a shadow, and there is none abiding." Some- 
thing of the weird loneliness of the wilderness for- 
ever haunted the imagination of Israel; the world 
is an awful silence, broken only by the thunder of a 
Divine voice, and ever moves on through the still- 
ness at the bidding of the voice. 



Marching to Music. 



129 



1. Pilgrimage is a true picture of human life. 

Life, for the city dweller, as well as the nomad, 
is a pilgrimage. It is as true of the mighty walls 
of granite as the canvas walls of the tent, that it is 
but a transient dwelling for any life, and it too shall 
pass away. 

" The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 
And, like this unsubstantial pageant, faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. ,! 

The mountains whose seeming solidity mocks the 
fleeting life of man, and the stars which shine a cold 
pity on our fugitive existence, are hardly less frail 
or more abiding than we. We are all gypsies, Arabs, 
tenting for the night; we shall soon strike canvas 
and move on. 

" Think, in this battered caravanserai, 
Whose portals are alternate night and day, 

How sultan after sultan with his pomp 
Abode his destined time, and went his way. 

'T is but a tent, where takes his midday's rest 
A sultan to the realm of Death addrest ; 

The sultan rises, and the dark Ferash 
Strikes and prepares it for another guest." 

9 



130 The Beauty o£ Jesus. 



2. The pilgrimage of life is made glad with song. 

There is a touch of melancholy in this conception 
of life as a pilgrimage, until we cheer the way with 
music. Pilgrims we are, but we may be singing 
pilgrims, and beguile the wilderness way with ring- 
ing songs, — 

" Even as pilgrims, who journey afar from their home and 
their country, 

Sing as they go, and, singing forget they are weary and 
wayworn." 

Perhaps there is no happier resource on a hard 
march than music. An Arabian saying has it, "Song 
is like the dew of heaven on the bosom of the desert ; 
it cools the path of the traveler. " The band is not 
the least effective part of the army. The stirring 
strains of martial music have often revived flag- 
ging strength, renewed failing courage and won a 
half-lost battle. It was to the superb swing of the 
"Marseillaise/' "Ye sons of freedom, wake to glory/' 
that the French troops under Napoleon dared the 
icy barriers of the Alps, and made a path to the con- 
quest of Italy. Again and again, in the great alle- 
gory, Bunyan makes his pilgrim relieve the difficult 
road with snatches of sacred song. 

Blessed are they who have learned to sing as they 



Marching to Music. 



journey! Through toil and weariness, through 
gloom and despair, through pain and anguish, the 
voice of song arises, and we feel ourselves immortal. 
There are lives that by their very harmony seem to 
bring heaven down to earth, all of whose words and 
actions seem timed to some heavenly rhythm. 

" There are in this loud stunning tide of human care and 
crime 

With whom the melody abides of the everlasting chime ; 
Who carry music in their heart 
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, 
Plying their daily task with busier feet 
Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat." 

3. The pilgrim's songs are songs of home. 

The pilgrimage of earth need not be aimless wan- 
dering. It is easy enough to chant dirges of de- 
spair as we contemplate the fleeting, fading life of 
man. The pessimistic Persian poet, already quoted, 
wails out — 

" A moment's halt, a momentary taste 
Of Being from the well within the waste 

And lo, the phantom caravan has reached 
The Nothing it set out for : — O make haste l" 

All healthy souls know that to be false. Ours is 
more than a "momentary taste of Being/' and our 
destiny is more than Nothing. If we, too, cry, 



132 The; Bsauty o£ Jesus. 



"Make haste !" it is because eternity beckons us, and 
there awaits us no "angel of the darker drink," but 
the white-winged heralds of immortality. 

This earth is a strange country to the immortal 
nature of man. The birthland and native country 
of the human soul is elsewhere. Heaven draws us 
as the southern summer draws the migratory birds. 
The prophet of the restoration of captive Israel hears 
the returning exiles, singing as they joyfully press 
forward by the path cast up in the wilderness. 

"The ransomed of the Lord shall return and 
come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon 
their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and 
sorrow and sighing shall flee away." 

Nothing but other-world music can really 
cheer us. No ballads of heroic tradition ; no carols 
of war, wine, or love ; no lyrics of merely mundane 
feeling, can conquer the sense of the frailty and in- 
security of this passing world. When the dead 
leaves fall about us, and the flowers of love and 
hope are faded; when the clods fall heavy on the 
coflin-lid, and the dearest treasures of earth vanish, 
— nothing can comfort but to hear the chimes of the 
eternity from which we came and toward which we 
are traveling. We refuse to "hang our harps upon 
the willow/' and, in spite of the wail of the Baby- 



Marching to Music. 133 

Ionian exiles, we will "sing the Lord's song in a 
strange land." Even when the throat is choked 
with sobbing and the voice hushed because "the 
daughters of music are brought low/' still the soul 
in its hope and longing will sing on, like the mur- 
mur of the sea-shell, which 

" Remembers its august abode, 
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there." 

Our pilgrim path lies between two eternities. 
We know that this "house of our pilgrimage" is but 
an inn on the road to "our Father's house." Just 
because we can "tarry but a night," we rejoice to 
sing songs of the everlasting day. Weariness sings 
of rest, pain chants a lay of lasting peace, sorrow 
lifts up its voice in joy, and dying nature raises the 
psalm of eternal life. That we are sojourners is 
an argument for home and a reason for singing. 
As Wordsworth has it, — the soul comes "from God, 
who is our Home," and sometimes 

" In a season of calm weather, 
Though inland far we be, 
Our souls have glimpse of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither, 
Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the children playing on the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 



134 The: Beauty of Jesus. 



In our too dominant sense of mortality we some- 
times talk of "passing into eternity;" but we are 
there already. Our eternity is here and near, if we 
did but know it ; we are bathed in its beauty, girded 
by its glory, and swathed in its songs. 

4. God is the music of the pilgrim life. 

Listen in the text to the answering beat of the 
twin pronouns, "Thy" and "my," and note how they 
bring together God and the human soul : "Thy stat- 
utes have been my songs." God is the music of 
life; that is the thought that sweeps the chords of 
the heart with majestic harmonies. He is the great 
musician, we are but the instruments. In the 
Apocalypse the redeemed are described as "having 
the harps of God;" indeed, they are themselves the 
harps of God. As the ^Eolian harp sings when 
touched by the fingers of the wind, so may the soul 
of man be tuned and touched by the Spirit of God. 
It is like that myth of the statue of Memnon at 
Thebes, of which it was fabled that the granite lips 
uttered a dulcet note of music when first touched 
by the morning light; we are so made as to break 
forth into song when a ray from His eternal sun- 
light touches our heart and lips. 



Marching to Music. 



135 



Every object has its keynote to which it responds 
in sympathetic vibrations. Strange stories are told 
of a fiddler who found the keynote of a bridge, and 
was able by insistent playing on that string to make 
it sway from its anchorage and at last to fiddle it 
down ! That is much more than a half truth when 
applied to our human hearts. They are strung to 
quiver in response to this great strain, this keynote, 
— God. The hymnody that cheers life's journey 
first beat out its music in the perfect melodies sung 
by the Master's heart. The God of the Bible is pic- 
tured as a happy God who sometimes sings : "He 
will joy over thee with singing." It is "God, our 
Maker, who giveth songs in the night;" it is He 
who puts a new song into the mouth of the saved 
man. Our highest human happiness is that we may 
enter into the joy of the Lord, the joy of redeeming 
love. 

There are no other songs like these. Earth has 
its secular songs, sweet and inspiring, — as boat 
songs, when the oars keep time to the tune ; harvest 
songs, accompanied by the silvery rustle of the fall- 
ing grain; national songs, in which a people raise 
the high anthem of a nation's pride ; love lays, which 
bear the burden of the heart's passion and tender- 



136 The; Beauty oe Jesus. 



ness. But sweetest of all are the high praises of 
God, when heart and voice are brought into con- 
cord with heavenly harmonies. 

II. The Law of Heaven is the Music oe Earth. 

"Statutes, songs," — what a singular association! 
At first it seems a very strange thought, for we do 
not ordinarily associate laws with music. The dry 
and dreary study of the law appears quite unlike 
the inspiring choral art. Our courts of justice do 
not commonly have a choir to open their sessions or 
to accompany their proceedings. Congress and 
other legislative bodies do not enliven their proceed- 
ings with songs. There is nothing lyric about civil 
law. I do not suppose there is much music, or 
poetry, either, about the Revised Statutes of the 
United States, the Code of Michigan, or the city 
ordinances of Detroit. Quite frequently they are 
not even good prose. 

Yet the idea of music is not so remote from 
even human law as, at first sight, we would think. 
The early legislation of primitive peoples not un- 
frequently was expressed in verse; such, for ex- 
ample, as the famous Laws of the Twelve Tables, 
the beginnings of Roman jurisprudence. But in the 
text it is the statutes of God, and not those of Manu, 



Marching to Music. 



i37 



Lycurgus, Solon, or Numa, that become the happy 
hymns sung by the pilgrims of earth. Though the 
laws of man be without rhyme or reason, the laws 
of God are Divine poetry, and sing their way into 
our earthly life. 

1. All music is the child of Law and a witness 
to the Lawgiver. 

Music is made by law ; it is the creature of or- 
der. The greatest musician is as much bound by 
these laws as the least. Each of its three elements 
is determined by mathematical laws as fixed and in- 
violable as the laws of motion that regulate heavenly 
bodies. Rhythm, with its regular beat and meas- 
ured movement; melody, with its consecutive inter- 
vals ruled by laws of assonance; harmony, with its 
parallel waves blending according to fixed princi- 
ples, — all are controlled by laws as certain as gravi- 
tation. Alan does not make these laws, he dis- 
covers them. In art, as in science, man must "think 
God's thoughts after Him." 

No wonder that the Greeks made music an im- 
portant branch of education, as teaching the beauty 
of order and symmetry, and the majesty of law. 
Music means obedience. There can be in it no self- 
will. Can we find a better illustration of subordi- 



138 The: Beauty otf Jssus. 



nation than a great orchestra where many and va- 
ried instruments obey every movement of the con- 
ductor's baton, who himself must follow the score of 
the composer, and he in turn must write his tone- 
poem according to the eternal laws of acoustics 
which were fixed for the first chorus of the morn- 
ing stars ? Noise is not music. The clangor of bells, 
the shrieking of engines, the clamor of voices, — 
in these the self-will is voiced. Anarchy sings no 
songs and keeps no step with the Divine purpose. 
The pilgrimage of the children of disobedience is a 
wild vagabondage, cheered by no songs and reg- 
ulated by no law. It is the pledge of the safety of 
human society, that the hosts of misrule can never 
raise an army that can march in time. Lawlessness 
has no organizing power. Somewhere its waves 
break helplessly against the granite cliffs of the 
eternal laws of God. Music is a witness to a right- 
eous King and a moral government of the world. 

2. The law of God is set to music. 

All the pictures of the created universe found in 
the Holy Scriptures make it to have its beginning 
and consummation in song. Its foundations were 
laid amid the glad chantings of the morning stars, 
its walls arose with song of angelic rejoicing, and 



Marching to Music. 



i39 



its final glories shall be revealed when Law and Love 
sing together the song of Moses and the Lamb, with 
"the voice of a great multitude, the voice of many 
waters, and the voice of mighty thunderings." 

" From harmony, from heavenly harmony, 
This universal frame began; 
From harmony to harmony 

Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 
The diapason closing full in man." 

The "music of the spheres," taught by Pythagoras, 
is not wholly a fable. 

" There 's not the smallest orb that thou behold'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubim." 

As they tread on soft feet of light through the spheric 
dance, the heavenly bodies are still telling the glory 
of God. 

The heavenly sphere, the realm of God and 
angels, is the homeland of song. Wherever its 
bright barriers have opened upon the gloom of our 
earthly pilgrimage, rapturous psalmody has always 
broken through. Isaiah saw the pillared strength 
of the temple of Jehovah sway to the praises of the 
seraphs that excel in strength, as they chanted the 
Trisagion with its mighty triple rhythm: "Holy, 
holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts ; heaven and earth are 



140 The; Beauty of Jesus. 



full of Thy glory/ 5 Shepherds in the fields about 
Bethlehem saw the starry pavements break up to 
let through clouds of glory, throngs of angels and a 
cataract. of tumultuous song: "Glory to God in the 
highest; on earth peace, good- will to men." And 
to John on Patmos, again the shining doors stand 
open, and the perfumed air is stirred with a new and 
Divine melody, unheard in heaven before, the new 
song of the first-begotten of earth. 

All sin is discord, all holiness is harmony. 
Heaven is the harmony of hearts and wills; its 
shining and singing hosts "do His pleasure/' "heark- 
ening unto the voice of His word." Earth makes 
noises, but heaven makes music, for it is the home 
of perfect law and the sphere of the perfect doing of 
God's will. Law, Duty — these make firm the pillars 
of the eternal world, and these alone secure the 
endurance of the created universe. 

" Through Thee, the stars are free from wrong : 
And the most ancient heavens through Thee are firm and 
strong." 

3. That which is law in heaven becomes music on 
earth. 

The commonplace of heaven is the best of earth. 
What here we call the ideal, to which we try pain- 
fully to fashion the rebellious clay of time, is the 



Marching to Music. 



real there, to which all glorified persons and things 
gladly conform. 

Art, which is man's effort freely to reproduce 
the ideal, is thus a witness for God. It is the 
attempt of man to incarnate a higher than natural 
beauty, to make the creations of his hands and brain 
si line with 

" The light that never was on land or sea" 

It is a taste of the eternal beauty born into time, a 
gleam of the supernal splendor. Of all arts, music 
is the most spiritual, and most expensive of the 
subtlest states of the mind. It can say what can 
never be spoken in language or be expressed in form 
or color. It is the speech of emotion, the chosen 
language of joy and love. Therefore, nothing is so 
fit as music to express the heavenly life. There is a 
mystic element in music by which it suggests the 
world of heavenly harmony out of which it came. 
As a testimony to spirit, Browning in "Abt Vogler" 
sets it above the other arts : 

" God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear, 
The rest may reason and welcome, — 'tis we musicians 
know." 

All the music of earth has that of heaven as its 
pattern and type ; all the poetry of earth is an echo 
of celestial songs; all the pictures of earth are a 



142 The Beauty oe Jesus. 



glimpse of its glory. All, all are but glimpses of 
God, who is perfect harmony and perfect beauty. 
The music of the Divine character, which is at once 
righteous law and holy harmony, sounds above the 
weariness of man's life, bringing him back to God. 

4. Law lends music to the pilgrim life because it 
speaks of permanence. 

Of the more than ten words which are used in 
this Psalm as synonyms of "law," the one in the 
text is the strongest. "Statutes" — that which is 
fixed, decreed. It stands in the most direct contrast 
with the transient life of man. In our pilgrim 
march, girt with graves and chasmed with change, 
we long for the deathless and enduring. Even the 
tyranny of fate would be better than the caprice 
of chance. W e have something better than either — 
the loving will of a righteous Governor, from whom 
we came and to whom we are bound. Life has no 
finer inspiration than this, that all the passing gen- 
erations of man can securely house themselves, as 
in an abiding dwelling-place, in Him who is from 
everlasting to everlasting our God. We hush the 
clamor of our noisy, passing years, and into our life 
comes the glad but solemn music of His Eternity. 
And so the "beauty of the Lord" fashions itself on 



Marching to Music. 



143 



the fading glory of our fleeting life, and by His 
changeless will even the work of mortal hands is 
established forever. Earth decays and time works 
changes, but the everlasting certainties sing on for- 
ever. The pilgrim's song is no mere impulse, no 
wild skyrocket blazing in uncertain and quickly- 
dying splendor; it is a steadfast star which burns 
on with an ever-undimmed luster. 

"Forever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in the 
heavens." Amidst the shadows of the transient we 
sing the glory of the permanent sphere to which we 
are more closely allied than to the passing shows of 
life. We live in tents like Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob; but, like them, we "look for the city that 
hath foundations." When our earthly lamps go out 
and the stars fall from the sky, we still can sing of 
the shadowless splendor of the land that never knows 
night. Permanence singing in the house of change — 
it is life triumphing over death, and spirit conquer- 
ing sense. Beyond our flowers that fade and fall, 
we breathe the fragrance of blooms that never 
blight. Amid the graves that gape to swallow up 
our loves, we rejoice in that undying love which 
shall knit all raveled friendships up, and make 
whole the rents of time. There is no "dying fall" 
in the note the singing pilgrim raises ; it is born of 



i44 The Beauty of Jesus. 



eternity and triumphs over time. It is law that 
sings, chance and fate can not overwhelm us. 

III. The pilgrim uee oe man should be brought 

IXTO HARMONY WITH THE MUSIC OE LAW. 

It is the purpose of God to bring all things into 
harmony with His law ; that is, with Himself. Tha 
mountain-top of all prayer is this: "Thy will be 
done in earth as it is in heaven. " To know, to love, 
to do the perfect will — that is the highest blessedness 
of man. Then shall every human soul become a lyre 
of praise, and every human life a lyric of joy. In 
such passages as the text and the Psalm which con- 
tains it, full of rapturous delight in and love of the 
law of God, the Old Testament is already touched 
by the spirit of the New. When law becomes lyrical, 
it is a germinal gospel. For the gospel does not 
make void the law, but fulfills it in that "law of the 
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" which comes from pro- 
founder depths of the heart and will of God than 
all positive ordinances. When the pilgrim of earth 
beholds the beauty of the eternal nature of God, his 
loyal love is stirred to sing with Faber : 

" Ride on, ride on triumphantly, 
Thou glorious Will, ride on ; 
Faith's pilgrim sons behind Thee take 
The road that Thou hast gone." 



Marching to Music. 



145 



1. Our natural life is out of harmony with the 
statutes of God. 

Until attuned. to the music of the Divine Law, 
man is like an unstrung harp, giving back to every 
touch only harshest discords. Earth is a Babel of 
discordant noises, and the sinning heart of man the 
chief disturber of the unison of being. Read the 
story of the wilderness wanderings of Israel, which 
probably suggested the imagery of our text. Pre- 
luded by trumpet blast and the quivering of the earth 
at the touch of Jehovah, they heard in the heart of 
the desert the awful voice of Law, delivered in the 
midst of angelic choruses and with the terrible ac- 
companiment of heaven's thunders. How imper- 
fectly they responded to its solemn music! All the 
way of their wandering was filled with the harsh 
dissonance of their murmurings ; and that is a true 
picture of the natural life of man. All the chords 
of his character, formed for sweetest concord, are 
like "sweet bells jangled, out of tune." 

Nor is it wholly "a pathetic fallacy," as Ruskin 
calls it, that hears in the physical world a harsh 
echo of man's moral discord. 

" The winds can never sing, but the}- must wail ; 
Waters lift up sad voices in the vale ; 
One mountain hollow to another calls 
With broken cries of plaining waterfalls." 
10 



146 The Beauty o* Jesus. 



The shadow of our sin and sorrow has fallen across 
the whole world, and instead of the universe its 
Maker called "very good," vibrating in sympathy 
with the song of the morning stars, we hear the 
jarring of the creation that "groans and travails to- 
gether in pain." 

It is the violation of the statutes of God that has 
untuned the heart of man, blasted the joy of nature, 
and filled society with conflict and tumult. No star 
or soul can break loose from the eternal chimes of 
order and law without becoming a strident note, to 
be cast out of the choir of being ; a "wandering star, 
to which is reserved the blackness of darkness for- 
ever." Therefore is the glory gone out of our 
hearts, the burden of song stilled upon our lips, and 
the music of life turned to discordant wailings — we 
have trodden His statutes under foot. 

" O earth, so full of dreary noises ! 
O men, with wailing in your voices !" 

All your misery is born of the rebellious will. The 
Master Musician still leads the mighty chorus of law 
and love, to charm our souls back into submissive 
harmony. 



Marching to Music. 



147 



2. In Jesus Christ we hear most perfectly the 
music of the Divine mind. 

One life has appeared among men, which, with- 
out jar or discord, expressed the full beauty of the 
law and will of God. It is the life of Jesus of 
Nazareth, whose perfect obedience to every moni- 
tion of His Father's will related Him to the heavenly 
and eternal order, "as perfect music unto noble 
words." The Son of man, alone of our humanity, 
can make His own the great prophetic cry of full 
surrender, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God !" 

Jesus has filled the world with song. The great 
English divine, Hooker, said of law, "Her seat is in 
the bosom of God, and her voice is the harmony of 
the world." Those words apply still more truly to 
the Lord Jesus. Had we still seen anything grim- 
visaged in the law, it became a heavenly song when 
we saw it "made honorable" in His sinless life. 
And His is the music that shall subdue our earthly 
discord and restore the last harmony of creation. 
Greek mythology fables that the walls of Thebes 
were built into beauty by stones that moved to their 
places obedient to the mere sound of the lyre of 
Orpheus. Thomas Carlyle catches the deepest sig- 
nificance of the myth when he says: "Our highest 



148 The Beauty otf Jesus. 



Orpheus walked in Judea eighteen hundred years 
ago; His sphere-melody, flowing in wild nature- 
tones, took captive the ravished souls of men; and, 
being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows and 
sounds, though now with manifold accompaniments 
and rich symphonies, through all our hearts; and 
modulates and divinely leads them." 

It is to the music of His will and word that the 
broken ruins of our nature, and at last all the living 
stones of earth, shall dance to their places in the 
walls of the New Jerusalem. 

"Jehovah is my strength and my song; He also 
is become my salvation." Such is the song of Moses, 
lawgiver of Jehovah, as he celebrates the deliverance 
of Israel from Egyptian bondage. A deeper mean- 
ing it has for us when we give it a gospel interpre- 
tation, and make it the song of the Lamb. It still 
thrills with the majesty of law, "Great and mar- 
velous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and 
true are Thy ways, Thou King of saints." But as 
they hear it in heaven, it is a new song ; the fragrant 
air trembles by a new and Divine melody unheard 
before. The chant of creation has become the 
chorus of the new creation — the song of redemption 
through the blood of the Lamb. 

O songless souls, that have lost the heaven out of 



Marching to Music. 



149 



your hearts! ye whose natures are filled with strife 
and turmoil; ye to whom the world is a desert 
waste, full of forced marches that mean nothing; 
ye in whom rebellious self-will has set up its jangle 
of harsh worldly noises — bring, I beseech you, the 
broken harps of your nature to Jesus Christ. He, 
the greater Son of the great harper of Israel, will 
restring the harpstrings of our lives and attune them 
to the heavenly music of His own perfect life. 
Then again will the voice of the strongest law be- 
come to us the voice of sweetest love to cheer our 
earthly sorrows, and we shall make our own the 
words of the ancient worshiper : "Thy statutes have 
been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage." 

It is interesting to listen to the tuning of an or- 
chestra before the concert begins. You can hear 
the several instruments slowly closing up the false 
intervals, and, as they all approach concert pitch, 
coming into unison with each other. So has God in 
Christ sounded the keynote of our life. Shall we not, 
one by one, bring our hearts and lives into harmony 
with His holy will? At last the Perfect One shall 
lift with pierced hand the baton of light, and the 
vast multitude that no man can number shall join 
the triumphant shout of the Hallelujah Chorus, "He 
shall reign for ever and ever." That strain of His 



150 The; Beauty of Jksus. 



perfect sovereignty and dominion shall be taken up 
rapturously by all the flaming choirs of the redeemed, 
and flung from part to part and voice to voice, until 
the very energies of heaven seem exhausted, and the 
mighty strain of a universal submission dies away 
before "the great white throne and Him that sit- 
teth thereon." At last the pilgrim song of earth, 
born of loyal love of law, shall blend in heavenly hal- 
lelujahs, whose only resting-place is the consummate 
calm of the eternal "Amen !" 



VII. 



THE FULLNESS OF GOD. 

AN EXPOSITION. 

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, 
from whom every family in heaven and on earth 
is named, that He would grant you, according to 
the riches of His glory, that ye may be strength- 
ened with power through His Spirit in the in- 
ward man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts 
through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted 
and grounded in love, may be able to apprehend 
with all the saints what is the breadth and length 
and height and depth, and to know the love of 
Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be 
tilled unto all the fullness of God. Now unto 
Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly 
above all that we ask or think, according to the 
pozver that worketh in us, unto Him be the glory 
in the Church and in Christ Jesus unto all gener- 
ations for ever and ever. Amen!' — Eph. iii, 14- 
21, R. V. 

151 



152 The: Bkauty off Jesus. 



Did you ever hear any one praying for you ? It 
is a holy memory, that of overhearing a father, or 
mother, or friend, in their personal devotions, hold- 
ing up our names to God in earnest intercession. 
Once, on entering my church in Baltimore, I heard, 
from the door of a classroom that stood ajar, the 
voice of one of the holiest men I ever knew plead- 
ing with God for me, his pastor. The uplift of that 
moment abides with me after nearly twenty years. 

For true prayer is a revelation in at least two 
ways. First, it reveals the soul-life of him who 
prays. The motions of our inner life in the moment 
of genuine prayer, as they interpret themselves in 
speech and act, are the surest possible index of the 
religious character. Second, it is in large measure 
a revelation of the deepest need of him for whom 
prayer is offered. We are frequently all too uncon- 
scious of our own spiritual defects and shortcomings. 
If we could only hear what the holiest men and wo- 
men who know us ask for when they pray for us, 
we would gain a glimpse of our truest selves, and 
freshly realize what is lacking in the religious tem- 
per of our lives. 

We are standing outside the closet door of the 
Apostle Paul, and overhearing a great soul as he 
climbs the mountain of intercession. His prayer re- 
veals the breadth of his spiritual vision, the richness 



The: Fuu,ness of God. 



i53 



of his personal experience, and the warmth of his 
loving heart. It also reveals what, in his inspired 
judgment, was the largest need of the Church. As 
such a revelation, it is full of instruction to the 
Church in every generation. Let us, in this light, 
devoutly study the fullness of blessing for which the 
apostle prays. 

I. The Nature of the: Blessing. 

This is not, in the ordinary sense of the word, 
a "higher-life" prayer. It is not, primarily, either 
faith or love with which he prays that the Church 
may be endowed. These are presumed as prime con- 
ditions of the larger fullness for which he is plead- 
ing. It is not some particular work of the Divine 
grace, some definite achievement in the spiritual life, 
which is contemplated; those will come along with 
the more comprehensive gift for which he is pray- 
ing. It is rather a prayer for an all-comprehending 
enlargement of spiritual power in the Church, which 
shall at once make possible every spiritual gift and 
every conceivable work of grace. 

1. It is a prayer for knowledge. 

This is involved in the motive of this entire let- 
ter to the Ephesians. It is a vision into the eternal 
purpose of God to unify all things in Christ. The 



154 



The: Beauty of Jesus. 



mighty argument sees this purpose as it flows from 
the electing love of God in eternity and is realized 
in time, "that in the dispensation of the fullness of 
times He might gather together in one all things in 
Christ, both of which are in heaven and on earth." 
The Church is conceived as the ubiquitous body of 
the ascended Lord, "the fullness of Him that filleth 
all in all." 

This "'mystery of His will," Paul is a minister to 
make known to the Gentile world, that all men might 
come into the "fellowship of the mystery." And so 
he prays for the enlargement of their knowledge, that 
through a more perfect apprehension of the purpose 
of God they might possess the "unsearchable riches 
of Christ." He felt that this vaster vision of the 
sweep and scope of the infinite plan of God would 
immeasurably enrich personal experience. 

A shallow and ignorant fanaticism sometimes 
fails to regard knowledge as a grace at all. It fatu- 
ously misunderstands John Wesley when he de- 
scribes evangelical perfection as perfection in love 
rather than in knowledge, and so blundering and 
stupid saints profess to be entirely sanctified and 
excuse their manifest frailties by the defense, "We 
are not made perfect in knowledge." There is a 
guilty ignorance of the will of God, which is itself a 



The; Fuixness of God. 



i55 



sin to be repented of. You "did not know any 
better ?" You ought to have known better. 

" Evil is wrought by want of thought 
As well as want of love." 

Knowledge is a Christian grace and an essential 
condition of many higher graces. "Add to your 
faith, knowledge/' says St. Peter ; and again exhorts, 
"Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord 
Jesus Christ." "The perfect manhood" which is 
contemplated by Paul in this epistle is one which is 
reached by "the unity of the faith and the knowledge 
of the Son of God." It is not a narrow and un- 
ripe purity, which a child or a fool may attain, but 
a full-orbed and matured manhood, which is the in- 
sistent petition of the Ephesian letter. 

2. This knowledge is founded in Faith. 

Faith, in the New Testament, has a moral and 
an intellectual side. It is conceived both as an act 
of will and a state of mind. Saving faith is a moral 
act of voluntary trust, by which the sinner accepts 
Jesus as Savior; but faith also involves spiritual 
perception; it rests on a judgment of moral and 
spiritual values. It is an inspired insight, by which 
the unseen is assured and the future held as a pres- 



156 The: Beauty of Jesus. 



ent possession. The faith which saves and the faith 
by which we live are one ; but the former is an act 
of the will, while the latter is the vision of the soul. 
Thus faith issues in knowledge. Faith is the door by 
which Christ and all the invisible world of spiritual 
reality enters the inner man. 

Faith and knowledge never can be separated 
without harm. The intellectual temperament tries 
to find knowledge without beginning with faith, and 
builds up a cold and lifeless orthodoxy ; the ignorant 
devotee has faith enough, but fails to perfect it in 
knowledge, and becomes the narrow bigot or the 
wild fanatic. The essence of the blessing is through 
faith; the fullness of the blessing is through 
knowledge. 

3. The knowledge prayed for is spiritual enlight- 
enment 

It is more than a mere intellectual attainment ; it 
is inspired insight. It is what Paul prays for in the 
first chapter: "That the God of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you 
the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge 
of Him, the eyes of your understanding being en- 
lightened that ye may know what is the hope of His 



The Fui^ness of God. . 157 



calling and what the riches of the glory of His in- 
heritance in the sense." 

Life is enlarged and enriched by larger light. 
Yonder in the meadows, all abloom with the crim- 
son clover, stand the large-eyed kine, lazily feeding 
in the rich forage. The artist, who has set his easel 
there, may have no better eyes than the cows; but 
he sees more, for he sees with something which is 
behind the eyes; he sees the violet light that plays 
in the shadows, and the changing shades of rose that 
come and go as the breeze sways the clover-tops. 
There is many an untaught Christian who is stand- 
ing kneedeep in the fields of blessing, lazily happy 
in cruder experiences, for whom there waits a glo- 
rious fullness when God shall open his inward sight 
to the deeper and broader meanings of the very life 
into which he has entered. 

II. The conditions of the blessing. 

The achievement of this knowledge is by a pro- 
cess of Divine education. The highest spiritual at- 
tainments are conditioned upon certain spiritual con- 
ditions. There is an alphabet of the Divine char- 
acter which we must learn before we can spell out 
the sweet poem of His love. What are some of these 
conditions ? 



158 The; Bkauty of 1 Jesus. 



1. A strengthened mind. 

Paul prays "that ye may be strengthened with 
might by His Spirit in the inner man." A char- 
acteristic gift of the Gospel is new power. There is 
a spiritual gymnastic needed to fortify the soul and 
strengthen it for higher attainments. God's people 
must be, in the best sense of that word, a strong- 
minded people. Religion is not a weak and nerve- 
less, but a strong and heroic thing. The body may 
be a giant and the soul a dwarf. Before the fullness 
of God can come into us, new capacity must be 
given, and our inner natures grow to stalwart di- 
mensions. It was no very great error when a col- 
ored preacher quoted, "Judge not the Lord by feeble 
saints;" for it would indeed be a severe reflection 
on both the power and goodness of God if He were 
judged by the flabbiness and feebleness of some of 
His children. 

Strength is needed to support the burden of the 
blessing which is to follow. Said Jesus to His dis- 
ciples, "I have many things to say unto you, but ye 
are not able to bear them now." And Paul found 
in the childish immaturity of the Corinthian Church 
a reason for not instructing them in that profounder 
spiritual wisdom which can only be spoken to them 



The: Fuixnsss o$ God. 



i59 



that are perfect. "I have fed you with milk, and 
not with meat ; for hitherto ye were not able to bear 
it, neither yet now are ye able." God will keep His 
dear children on spoon victuals until they gain force 
of spirit to contain His fullness. There have been 
great moments of mighty blessing in some of our 
lives, when in such pressure of glory His grace 
flooded our soul, that we have cried out in the very 
weakness of our earthen vessels, "O Lord, stay Thy 
hand, lest I die of Thy delights!" Let us rather 
pray with Paul for the inward strength which shall 
prepare the way for the fullness of God. 

2. The power of an ever-present Ideal. 

The prayer goes on, "that Christ may dwell in 
your hearts by faith." If we are to grow in knowl- 
edge the subject of our contemplation must be al- 
ways before us. I have a friend who carries Greek 
tragedies in his pocket to read on the street-car ; he 
has become a great Greek scholar. The botanist 
who would learn botany must spend much time 
in the field with plants and flowers ; the astronomer 
who would master the system of the heavens must 
pass his nights straining his eyes through the tele- 
scope; the Christian who would become a mature 
Christian must set his Lord always before him, for 



160 The; Beauty otf Jesus. 



the person of Christ is the very essence of Chris- 
tianity. There are days, however, when winter frosts 
have blighted the bloom of summer, and the botanist 
can not commune with forest or field ; there are times 
when the clouds shall jealously hide the lamps of 
heaven from the astronomer's gaze ; but the Rose of 
Sharon and the Lily of the Valley may forever blos- 
som in the garden of the heart, and the Bright and 
the Morning Star forever shine in the firmament of 
the soul. 

3. Fellowship in knowledge. 

We can only achieve the loftiest spiritual vision 
within the communion of saints. It must be appre- 
hended "with all saints." The very key-thought of 
Ephesians is oneness. If Gentile and Jew have been 
made one new man, all earth's buildings are to be 
builded together into one holy temple for the habita- 
tion of the Spirit. The Christian perfection which 
Paul here teaches is no solitary virtue ; it is achieved 
only in the family in heaven and earth, which owns 
common Fatherhood with Jesus. He exhorts "to 
keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace; 
there is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called 
in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, 
one baptism: one God and Father of all, who is 



The Fullness of God. 161 

above all and through all and in you all." It is no 
individual, but the whole Church, which goes to 
form that "perfect man, the measure of the stature 
of the fullness of Christ." 

No one mind is equal to the study of any sci- 
ence, much less that of salvation. No one age of 
the Church, no one theologian or religious genius, 
has ever grasped the whole meaning of the Lord. 
We must learn to see w T ith them all, to feel man's 
impotence with Augustine, God's sovereignty with 
Calvin, the freedom of faith with Luther, and the 
freeness and fullness of grace with Wesley. We 
can not fully see or enjoy anything by ourselves; it 
takes four eyes to see a picture or a landscape. There 
is something wrong about any man who can sit 
alone in a restaurant and enjoy a long course din- 
ner. We feed alone, but we eat in company. There 
are mighty blessings being held back by God in the 
reserved heavens, until the wounds in the body of 
Christ have been healed. Not until His Church 
see eye to eye will the Lord bring again Zion. Real 
spiritual unity will be the prelude for a new Pen- 
tecost : 

" Not on one favored head alone 
The Pentecostal glory shone ; 
But flamed o'er all the assembled host 
The baptism of the Holy Ghost." 

ii 



1 62 The: Beauty oe Jesus. 



4. "Rooted and grounded in love!' 

Love is the condition of the highest knowledge. 
Pascal, the greatest of all Frenchmen, said, "Hu- 
man things must be known to be loved, but Divine 
things must be loved to be known." Light is the 
child of love, the blossom of that love that roots 
itself deep in the heart of Jesus. The rhetoric of 
the apostle has reached a white heat of passion 
which breaks through grammar and rhetoric. Love 
is so great a thing that it needs a mixed metaphor, 
"rooted and grounded," one derived from the world 
of nature, and one from the world of art ; it is a soil 
from which the perfect life grows like a tree; it is a 
foundation from which sanctified character rises like 
a temple. 

III. The measure of the blessing. 

There really is no measure ; we are dealing with 
incommensurables, our commerce is with the In- 
finite. Language is exhausted to express it. It is 
"according to His riches and glory," "according to 
the power that worketh in us," "the unsearchable 
riches of Christ." All is measured, not by human 
standards, but by the Divine nature. Indeed, all 
religious experience is measured by the notion we 



The: Fullness o£ God. 163 



have of God ; a poor God makes an impoverished life. 
To be full-statured Christians we need a great God, 
and great conceptions of Him. Shriveled souls are 
brought forth by narrow and bigoted theologies. 

And so the prayer goes on to speak of the 
breadth, the length, depth, and height — of what? 
The text does not specify. We shall need the con- 
text. At the close of the third chapter, Paul had 
reached the sublime conception of the spiritual tem- 
ple into which all lives and institutions are to be 
built; it is a picture of the consummation of the 
eternal plan to bring together all things in Christ. 
This is for him 

" The one far-off Divine event 
To which the whole creation moves. 5 ' 

As he sees the stately edifice, his soul swells 
to the vision, and he longs that the Ephesians shall 
share the greatness of his dream. And so in Ephe- 
sians i, 1, he begins to pray, "For this cause, I Paul." 
But the mention of his own name stops the full 
tide of petition, and for thirteen verses he shows 
his own office as "minister of this mystery," only 
resuming the prayer at the fourteenth verse: "For 
this cause I bow my knees." Is it not clear that, by 
height, length, depth, and breadth he means the 



1 64 The; Beauty otf Jesus. 



•dimensions of that temple which pictures for him 
the eternal purposes of God in Christ? He prays 
that they may grasp the greatness of the Divine 
plan. 

Modern geometers have theorized of non-Euclid- 
ean space of more than three dimensions; Paul 
seems to have found it in these four measures of the 
infinite love and thought. Let us study them. 

i. The Breadth. 

The purpose of God in Christ is as big as the 
universe; it is as wide as the whole diameter of 
being. As the stars lie like islands in the blue sea 
of the firmament, so do all creatures in the vast ex- 
panse of His love. Once to grasp it would be to 
lose our littleness and narrowness in the breadth of 
His vastness. 

" For the love of God is broader 
Than the measure of man's mind." 

Far out beyond our dreaming His care extends 
and His mercy reaches. O, cribbed and confined 
hearts, lives that have grown like a plant in a crev- 
ice until they are blanched and flattened, grasp but 
once His greatness, and ye shall gain a wider life ! 
There are some men so narrow-minded that you 



The Fullness oe God. 165 

have to look at them sideways to see that they have 
any mind at all. The only remedy is in the fullness 
of God. 

2. The Length. 

It has pretension as well as extension ; it fills 
all time as well as all space. He is "from everlast- 
ing to everlasting/*' the dwelling-place of all godly 
generations. He cries out to us, who measure by 
years, months, and days. "Behold, I have loved you 
with an everlasting love.''" Himself, His plans, and 
His love are dateless. 

You can find no beginning to it. It is not Cal- 
vinism to believe that my salvation is an act belong- 
ing to an eternal order. It began in eternity. Sup- * 
pose an angel should fly back from this hour and 
perch- on the cross-beam of the cross, still back of 
him he would hear Isaiah heralding and David 
chanting the coming Redeemer; no, nor at Eden's 
gate would he find any beginning in that promise, 
"the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's 
head/' which was like a ray from the looks of Jesus, 
flung backward through the millenniums. Xo, we 
must go back, back into eternity, before the mandate 
of creation, before nothingness curdled into the 
white foam of stars and systems to break in spray 



1 66 The: Beauty of Jesus. 

of offered service at the feet of God; there, in the 
awful silence of His majestic solitude, was born in 
the eternal heart the seed of that crimson rose of 
sacrifice whose perfect beauty hung on the thorny 
branches of the cross. 

Nor is there any end; His promises are for the 
eternal years, and shall not fail. The river of sal- 
vation is no desert stream, to lose itself in the sands, 
but widens and deepens to the infinite ocean. 

3. The Depth. 

This is the measure of His loving purpose as we 
follow it from the heights downward. It reaches from 
the throne to the manger ; yea, lower yet, from glory 
to shame, down to the cruel cross and the awful 
kingdoms of the dead; down the long stairway of 
the incarnation to the depths of my sin and sorrow. 

" O love, thou fathomless abyss, 
My sins are swallowed up in thee." 

4. The Height. 

This is the same dimension as the last, but it is 
measured from below upward. He stands looking 
from the platform of earth up to the pinnacle 
of all being, and sees there the topmost thing of 
all the universe, crowning the cathedral of creation, 



The: Fullness o£ God. 167 



the shining cross of Jesus Christ. In the next chap- 
ter he brings the depth and the height together. 

"Wherefore He saith : When He ascended up on 
high, He led captivity captive and gave gifts unto 
men. Now that He ascended, what is it but that He 
also descended first into the lower parts of the earth ? 
He that descended is the same also that ascended up 
far above all heavens, that He might fill all things." 

"That He might fill all things!" Such is the 
ubiquity of the risen and glorified body of our Lord. 
He went down into the depths and has gone up on 
high, carrying everywhere, into every nook and 
cranny of the universe, the perfume of His love and 
the blood of His sacrifice. The incense fills the whole 
temple of being, and His blood sprinkles all the 
doorposts of creation. 

" There shall crown Him the topmost, inefFablest, uttermost 
crown ; 

And His love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave, up nor 
down, 

A place for the creature to stand in !" 

O, my soul, sail out, sail out on this wide ocean 
of redemptive purpose, and, like some new Colum- 
bus, steer thy bark beyond the rirn of twilight, and 
ever, ever widening horizons shall greet thee, and 
new worlds of gracious beauty yield to thy adven- 



1 68 The; Bsauty o* Jdsus. 



ture ; but thou shalt find no farthest limit to the lov- 
ing purpose of our God. 

O, my soul, press forward with flying feet down 
all the pathways of eternal years; pass beyond the 
confines of burning worlds and changing ages ; fol- 
low, until the weary and exhausted years, in ever- 
lasting procession about the eternal throne, fall at 
last in utter faintness, and wornout time sinks into 
the arms of eternity, — and thou shalt find no end 
to the loving purpose of our God. 

O, my soul, sink thy plummet in this sea of bless- 
ing thousands of fathoms deep, and down beneath 
all finite measures, undergirding the foundations of 
the world, lies the deep, fathomless, loving purpose 
of our God. 

, O, my soul, like a strong bird on pinions free, 
climb thou the upper air, and when at last, having 
overtopped all finite heights, thou shalt, in very faint- 
ness of joyous flight, swoon at the feet of God, then 
shalt thou see, still overarching all, height above 
height of splendor yet unsealed, the loving purpose 
of our God. 

IV. The: fuianess of the bussing. 

It is not every kind of knowledge that fills a man. 
This does; for in the thought of Paul faith always 
identifies the believer with the object of faith. To 



The Fulness of God. 169 



believe in Christ is to receive Christ, be united with 
Him, and identified with all His loving, saving acts. 
The same is true of that completed faith which is- 
sues in this vaster spiritual vision. To grasp, in a 
great moment of revealing, the breadth, length, 
depth, and height of God's redemptive plan of the 
ages, is to become one with it, to be "filled with all 
the fullness of God." The richness and blessedness 
of the entire body of Christ is reproduced in each 
individual member, and he becomes a microcosm 
of the universe of love. 

1. This does not destroy individuality. 

The Christian communion with God is worlds 
away from pantheistic absorption into the Infinite. 
The self-surrender to which Jesus calls us is not 
the spiritual suicide of the mystic or the Buddhist. 
We lose ourselves to win ourselves. The gospel 
ideal is not a mutilated or slain selfhood, but one 
which is dead only to that which marred its perfec- 
tion; it is a fuller and nobler selfhood, enriched 
from the infinite fullness. Not less of life, but "life 
more abundantly," is the gift of the Good Shepherd 
to His sheep. Each, for himself, may share the 
comprehension of all saints, may enter into the Di- 
vine consciousness, and appropriate the moral at- 
tributes of God. In the perfected character of the 



170 The; Beauty o$ Jesus. 



individual Christian is to be reflected that perfect 
Man in whom the fullness of all existence shall at 
last be gathered. Vision shall secure likeness. "We 
shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." 

2. To Unite beings this experience involves a 
paradox. 

For the apostle puts no limitation into his pe- 
tition. He does not pray, as I have heard some good 
men, that we may be filled with all the "communica- 
ble" fullness of God, but boldly and inclusively for 
all. Yet he is quite aware of the paradox, and puts 
it in the words, "that ye may know the love of 
Christ that passeth knowledge." We may know 
the unknowable, see the unseen, and, though finite, 
be filled with the Infinite. This is the constant par- 
adox of the highest life of man. At the summit of 
our being we lose ourselves in God, yet are ever con- 
scious of that rounded selfhood which marks our 
human personality. Yet a pint cup can be as full 
as the ocean; in the face of the violet may dwell 
as true a blue as in the whole bend of the azure sky ; 
in the dewdrop that lies in the lily's chalice may 
dwell as perfect a radiance of light as fills the shin- 
ing firmament. 

It is the very mark of the highest knowledge that 
it issues in ignorance. This is peculiarly so of love ; 



The: Fuixness of God. 



171 



it forever stands in loving awe before the unre- 
vealed. A noble man said to me of his equally noble 
wife, on the day of their golden wedding : "I thought 
I knew her long ago, but every day I find something 
new and beautiful; she is more mysterious and 
dearer every day." The more we know, the less we 
know ; the vaster the circle of our knowledge, and the 
longer its circumference, the more numerous the 
points at which it touches the unknown. Great 
things are best known in their immensity. It is best 
not to give a quantitative measure to a qualitative 
glory. Who asks, when standing before Niagara, 
how many gallons of water it discharges in a min- 
ute? Who cares to know as he contemplates some 
vast cathedral, a poem in stone, how many perches 
of mason work it contains? Our divinest experi- 
ences can not be expressed in statistics, and can not 
be sobered down to general averages. 

Christian perfection is not some fixed stadium, 
which achieved, the soul can rest in sweet self-satis- 
faction ; it is rather a perpetual transformation from 
glory into glory of the spirit, which reflects, as in a 
mirror, the image of our glorified Lord. It is to for- 
get the things which are behind, and to reach forth 
to those things w r hich are before. "Let us there- 
fore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded." 



172 The; Beauty of Jesus. 



V. The: praise due for the blessing. 

Paul allows no final climax to his thought. We 
thought we had compassed it all in asking for the 
fullness of God ; but praise soars higher than prayer, 
and rapturously flings itself in adoration before 
"Him who is able to do for us exceeding abundantly 
above all that we can ask or think." A story is told 
of a pious old woman who had lived a poor, narrow 
life, far inland among the hills, who was permitted 
to visit the ocean. When at last the boundless blue 
stretched before her, losing itself to view beyond 
the horizon's verge, her starved soul swelled with 
the sight, and she cried out, "Thank God, at last 
I 've got something there is enough of !" On the 
mountain-tops of prayer the soul takes flight in 
praise, bursting in its gladness before the abun- 
dance of our God. 

Make it a refrain to every petition: Would we 
be "strengthened by might with His Spirit in the 
inner man?" He will do it "exceeding abundantly 
above all we can ask or think." Would we have 
"Christ dwell in our hearts by faith?" He will come 
in, "exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or 
think." Do we long to grasp the "breadth, length, 
depth, and height" of the Divine plan? He will 



Thk Fullness of God. 173 



impart an insight "exceeding abundantly above all 
we can ask or think/' Are we longing for the 
"fullness of God?" We may have it "exceeding 
abundantly above all we can ask or think." And 
He will do it through the power that raised Christ 
from the dead, the very "power that worketh in us." 

1. Note the failure of full expression in prayer. 

Language fails; His giving is far beyond our 
eloquence in asking. Thought is sparingly soluble 
in speech. We can tell but little of what we think, 
and still less of what we feel. Language is easily 
bankrupted as a measure of spiritual worth. An elo- 
quent Welsh preacher, addressing a London con- 
gregation, at the climax of his sermon, tongue-tied 
by the unutterable meaning of his message, ex- 
claimed, "O, if you could only understand Welsh !" 
And so we long for a thousand tongues to sing His 
praises. 

" How little we bring when we homeward turn 
From the realm where the untold glories burn ! 
Some beauty we 've brushed from the lily's bloom, 
A taste of the sweetness we can not consume, 

A hint of the fullness abounding : — 
But its stars die away in the glare of the day, 
And the lily fades in the world-sun's glow ; 
In the chalice of speech there remains but the spray 
Of the waters sweet that forever flow 
The island of earth-life surrounding.'* 



i74 The; Bsauty of Jesus. 



Thought fails as well as language. The tongue 
tires before the brain and heart, but they are wearied 
soon enough. And at last our finite nature stands 
in helpless silence before the infinite fullness, and 
all about the splendor seen and felt there roll bright 
waves of unseen and unimagined glory. 

" Fair are the flowers and the children, 

But their subtle suggestion is fairer ; 
Rare is the rose-burst of dawn, 

But the secret that clasps it is rarer ; 
Sweet the exultance of song, 

But the strain that precedes it is sweeter ; 
And never was poem yet writ 

But the meaning outmastered the meter. 

Great are the symbols of being, 

But that which is symboled is greater ; 
Vast the create and beheld, 

But vaster the inward creator ; 
Under the joy that is felt 

Lie the infinite issues of feeling ; 
Crowning the glory revealed 

Is the glory that crowns the revealing." 

We need not be technical in our prayers. It is 
not their words or logic, but their fervency, which 
makes them effectual. We need not fear that God 
will give out, or hold in our prayers for fear of His 
unwillingness. Ask largely, O my soul, for thou art 
asking of a King. 



The Fullness of God. 



i75 



2. Where prayer breaks down, praise can go in 
singing, 

'Unto Him be glory in the Church. " Paul is 
in prison. He is writing to a humble Church, largely 
made up of Greek slaves, Roman freedmen, and out- 
cast Jews; yet, in spite of the contempt of philoso- 
pher or emperor, he claims for them a splendor out- 
rivaling the tawdriness of earth. To their keeping 
the eternal God hath committed His glory. They 
were the choir to chant His endless praises. 

''Throughout all generations" no one age can 
ever exhaust the holy homage. Generation shall 
pass the swelling tide of hallelujahs to generation. 
Our Methodist fathers said it audibly and lustily, 
"Glory to God !" I fear we but whisper it ; and shall 
it be that our children shall only think it? The 
Church that, knowing the fullness of the blessing, 
shall revive the dying ministry of praise, will gain 
by it a militant strength that will win the world 
to Jesus. 

"Unto Him be glory for ever and ever!" For- 
ever shall the prayer go up, forever the blessing 
come down, and forever the vast tide of praise re- 
turn to its source. Earth's speech, time-colored, 
breaks down as it approaches eternity. "Through- 



176 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



out all generations/' — that is the tribute of time; 
"for ever and ever/' — that sends the anthem for- 
ward into eternity. For praise is the chief occu- 
pation of the everlasting ages. As here we praise 
Him best by service, it may be that there we shall 
serve Him best by praise. 

One day the reunited generations shall know the 
vaster fullness of the Father's house, and Time shall 
go out to meet eternity amid the symphonious chant- 
ing of heaven and earth : 

Geory be to the Father, geory be to the Son, 
glory be to the hoey ghost ; as it was in the 
beginning, is now, and ever shaee be, wored 
without end. amen. 



VIII. 



AT THE BEAUTIFUL GATE. 

"And a certain man lame from his mother's womb 
was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of 
the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms 
from them that entered the temple." — Acts iii, 2. 

The story from which the text is taken is itself a 
thing of exceeding beauty ; it tells of a beautiful deed, 
done in a beautiful way, at the Beautiful Gate of 
the temple. We know very little about this Beau- 
tiful Gate itself, for there were many of the temple 
portals that deserved the designation. Perhaps it 
was the one of Corinthian bronze, which, Josephus 
tells us, was even more exquisite in its beauty than 
those overlaid with silver and gold; or it may have 
been that other famous gate which opened toward 
the valley of Kedron and looked toward Olivet, and 
which was so lovely with its wrought lily-work that 
it was called Shushan, or the Lily Gate. 

Holy Scripture is full of the symbolism of the 
door, and gives us ample warrant for using this nar- 
12 177 



178 The; Beauty o* Jesus. 



rative for wider spiritual suggestion than is at once 
apparant in its surface meaning. The singers of 
Israel long ago saw deep significance in these temple 
gates. "The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more 
than all the dwelling-places of Jacob." "Open to 
me the gates of righteousness; I will go in unto 
them and praise the Lord ; this gate of the Lord into 
which the righteous shall enter." And a great 
prophet of the exile cries out as he catches a vision 
of the restored Jerusalem, "Thou shalt call thy 
walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise.'' 

Not only the visible temple mentioned in the 
text, but the unseen spiritual house of God which 
it typifies, has its gates, and the spiritual city, the 
perfected Church, the Bride of Christ, New Jerusa- 
lem which comes down from God out of heaven, 
is pictured in the apocalyptic vision as having three 
gates on each side, each gate a lustrous pearl. These 
gates of God are not like that Porta Santa of St. 
Peter's Church at Rome, which is closed with mason 
work, that none may pass, save once in fifty years, 
when the pope breaks through to celebrate a jubilee 
mass. For it is testified in Old Testament and 
New that — 

" The happy gates of gospel grace 
Stand open night and day." 



At the Beautiful Gate. 



i/9 



What lessons, then, may we learn as we stand 
with Peter, John, and the cripple at the Beautiful 
Gate of the temple of God ? 

I. The Beautiful Gate teaches us that God's 

HOUSE SHOULD BE BEAUTIFUL. 

Upon it should be lavished all the loving skill 
and art of the world. Such was the ancient temple 
of Jehovah, of which it is written, "Out of Zion, the 
perfection of beauty, God hath shined." A prophet 
sadly bewails that "our holy and beautiful house, 
where our fathers praised Thee is burned with fire," 
and he exults with joy as in prophetic vision he be- 
holds its rebuilding. "The glory of Lebanon shall 
come unto thee, the fir-tree, the pine-tree, and the 
larch together, to beautiful the place of my sanc- 
tuary ; and I will make the place of my feet glorious." 

So should all our places of worship be as fair 
to see as our means and an honest use of them 
will allow. There is little force in the contention 
that noble architecture will repel the poor and hum- 
ble from the gates of God. It is not the beauty of the 
temple, but the unbeautiful selfishness of the wor- 
shipers, which chiefly keeps the beggar and the crip- 
ple from the sanctuary of the Most High. Too often 
there is a spirit manifested by rich and prosperous 



180 The; Beauty o£ Jesus. 



attendants of the house of God which encourages the 
Pharisee and hypocrite to draw near, and the pub- 
lican and sinner to stand "afar off." The noblest 
cathedrals and churches of Europe are thronged by 
the working masses. Let the poorest outcast feel 
that, spite of the squalid surroundings of his home 
and the unlovely details of a sordid life, there is one 
beautiful thing which belongs to him, and that the 
Father's house is fairly adorned for the gladness of 
his eyes and the inspiration of his higher life. 

II. The Beautiful Gate teaches us that all 

BEAUTY IS A GATE TO GOD. 

i. Our God loves Beauty. 

He has lavished it freely in all His works. It 
is everywhere a footprint of His presence, and a 
witness to the being and character of Him whose 
is all the loveliness of flower and star, all the grace 
of the forest, and all the sublimity of mountain and 
sea. The significance of beauty is a much-neglected 
branch of that great argument from design in which 
the adaptations of nature are shown to be proofs of 
the intelligence of God. That which so answers to 
the subjective demands of human taste and stirs the 
sense of beauty in the human soul is a witness to 
the great Artist, in whose nature all beauty first 



At the; Beautiful Gate. 181 

lived as an ideal, and then blossomed into being at 
His creative touch. Beauty testifies to the being and 
the nature of God, whether we regard the natural 
beauty which speaks of Him directly, or the beauty 
of art in which man expresses his dream of the ideal. 

Even in unseen places, where no human eye can 
behold it, the Divine hand and touch has shaped 
things into fairness for the delight of the All-seeing 
Eye and the satisfaction of the sense of beauty that 
dwells in the heart of the Eternal. The "lily of the 
fields," whose robing of gorgeous color outshines 
the splendid attire of kings, draws its tints from 
the warmth of His imagining, and is beautiful be- 
cause He "so clothed" it. And even so all carven 
lilies, all graceful spires and rounded domes, all the 
artistic achievements wrought by the cunning hands 
of creative genius, are gateways by which to enter 
the house of the Lord, "to behold the beauty of the 
Lord and to inquire in His temple." 

2. Beauty is also a testimony to the higher needs 
of man. 

I have an appetitite in my eye and ear as well 
as in my palate, which calls not less urgently for 
satisfaction. The world was made for the soul as 
well as for the senses. The useful and the beautiful 



182 



The: Beauty oe Jesus. 



are not opposed to each other. Our city would not 
be richer, but poorer in every way, if it turned our 
lovely park into a brickyard. It would profit a man 
nothing to plant cabbages instead of roses, and 
onions in the place of lilies. All other values would 
soon fail if this nobler worth of things were disre- 
garded. Wherever beauty glows ; wherever forms 
are fair or color throbs with its pulsing waves of dear 
delight; wherever music weaves its mystic spell to 
enthrall the sense and stir the heart, — there is a door 
to the presence of our God, if we did but know it; 
a gate through which the devout soul may pass into 
the temple of His holiness. For we are called to 
''worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." Na- 
ture and art are gateways to spirit, more elaborately 
decorated than any portal of the temple of old. 

3. Beauty is the overflow of sanctified per- 
sonality. 

All beauty is not outward beauty. There is a 
loveliness which appeals to our inner sight, which is 
more than form and color ; it is spiritual beauty, the 
beauty of the deed and of character. Every un- 
selfish act, heroic deed, or beautiful life is a true 
door by which we may enter the nature of our God. 
It is written of Stephen that his face at the moment of 



At the Beautiful Gate. 183 



martyrdom was to beholders as the face of an angel. 
Certainly that did not mean some visible aureole or 
halo, such as artists paint about the heads of saints. 
I think it was rather that unearthly beauty we have 
often surprised on the faces we love, like the strange 
spiritual luminosity which we sometimes see on the 
face of the dying, and lingering still on the calm 
features of the dead, like a foregleam of coming and 
eternal glory. The plainest face illumined by love 
may become beautiful. We may see this light in the 
face of the forgiven, in the countenance of the pray- 
ing saint, and on the visage of the strong man all 
aflame with righteous courage. There are great 
moments in life w T hen the spirit shines so brightly 
that it blazes through the body. Gazing then, we no 
more see the perishing clay but the glory divine 
of an immortal spirit. It is the reflected glory of 
the face of Jesus Christ. 

4. Jesus is the true gate to God. 

All others are but types of Him. He says of 
Himself, "I am the Door, I am the Way; no man 
cometh unto the Father but by Me." And is He 
not a most Beautiful Gate? A Messianic Psalm de- 
clares, "Thou art fairer than the children of men." 
We have fitly adapted to Him the rapturous descrip- 



1 84 The: Beauty of Jesus. 



tions of the Hebrew song of loves: "He is fairest 
among ten thousand, and altogether lovely/'' The 
fairest flowers are but figures of His loveliness : "He 
is the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley." 
The heavenly glories but dimly describe His splen- 
dor; He is the "Sun of Righteousness/' the bright 
and the "Morning Star." All other gates and all 
other beauties yield to Him, beautiful beyond our 
earthly dreams, and the supreme and only way to 
God. 

III. WS CAN ALSO LEARN A USEFUL LESSON FROM 
THE CRIPPLE AS HE LIES OUTSIDE THE BEAUTI- 
FUL Gate. 

i. The alms of the world are largely distributed 

at the doors of God's house. 

The finest philanthropies are not administered 
at the proud portals of pleasure, or at the busy bar- 
riers of trade. There the mendicant will be told 
to "move on," or the dogs will not be allowed to lick 
his sores. This beggar was no fool ; he knew that 
the praying people are also the giving people. From 
the healing, blessing, loving hands of Jesus, the 
Way, have come the manifold charities of Christen- 
dom. Out of the gates of His kingdom flow the 
streams of benevolence that are sweetening the bit- 



At ths Beautiful Gate. 185 

ter waters of our sorrowful life. The hospital, or- 
phanage, asylum, and refuge are built close about the 
gates of the Church. 

2. The cripple is typical of fallen humanity ly- 
ing helpless outside the gates of God. 

It is a strange and striking contrast, — the de- 
formed and helpless cripple, and the delicate tracery 
of the Beautiful Gate. But it is true to life. Man, 
the climax of creation, the one creature in whose 
self-consciousness its whole life is reflected, the being 
who most enjoys its beauty, is the one whose char- 
acter and deeds are most in discord with it. It is 
he who fills the world with ugliness and deformity. 
He poisons its rivers, vitiates its air, destroys its 
forests, defiles its purity, and turns its native love- 
liness into hideous wastes. All the world is like 
that tropical garden of Ceylon, where 

" Ever}' prospect pleases 
And only man is vile." 

Close beside the beauty of nature, the glory of art, 
the achievements of culture, the splendor of science, 
and the majesty of empire, goes on the misery and 
martyrdom of man. There is a striking companion 
picture to this in the story told in the fifth chapter 
of John of the pool of Bethesda and its crowds of 



1 86 The: Beauty of Jesus. 



invalids waiting for the miracle of healing. The 
focused wretchedness of a city there seen is but a 
picture of our earth. Nature's porches of beauty are 
filled with sufferers; her crystal waters are lined 
with the multitudes that seek for health and hap- 
piness. 

All this is symptomatic of a spiritual malady. 
The blind are types of a deeper blindness of mind 
and heart. The lame and the paralytic are pictures 
of our moral helplessness and impotence of will. 
Back of the thousand diseases of earth lies the more 
awful sickness of sin. It is the only real evil; all 
others could be borne if this were cured. The South 
Sea Islanders' fable that the dew at nightfall is the 
weeping of nature over the tearing apart of heaven 
and earth ; and it is true. Man brings the real dis- 
cord into the world. In the evil heart of man lies 
the fountain that poisons the river of our joy. The 
evils of the world are not evils, save as seen by the 
vision of the depraved human heart. We have lent 
our sadness to the world ; beside its gates of beauty 
and into its porches of magnificence we have dragged 
our sin-sick natures. Not only in the slums of cities, 
or on the barbarism of the desert, but everywhere, 
man is the one deformed thing in the universe, lying 
helpless at the Gates of Beauty, but outside. 



At the: Beautifui, Gate:. 187 



3. Man can not be healed by beauty. 

There was nothing in the exquisite art which 
adorned the gate or in the grandeur of the temple 
to restore the cripple to health and strength. If 
there had been healing in the beauty, there were 
many avenues by which he might have received it. 
He was not wholly helpless. He was not blind, 
but could see the delicate tracery of carven lilies, 
feast his eyes on the marble magnificence of the tem- 
ple, and drink in the noble panorama of the circling 
hills; he was not deaf, but could hear the white- 
robed choirs of Levites as they sang antiphonally the 
praises of Israel; he was not dumb, but could lift 
his voice in petition for alms. If close contact with 
the means of aesthetic culture and noble religious 
ritual could save any man, this man ought to have 
been saved long ago. Yet all these made him no 
better. 

Beauty does not heal; it has no power to restore 
the lost glory of our lives. The gospel of culture 
can not redeem man. Wealth, knowledge, power, 
pleasure, — none of these can save. The priestly 
prophet of the Exile utters the word of Jehovah 
to Jerusalem: "Thou wast exceedingly beautiful, 
. . . and thy renown went forth among the 



1 88 The: Beauty of Jssus. 

heathen for thy beauty; for it was perfect through 
My comeliness which I had put upon them, saith 
the Lord God. But thou didst trust in thine own 
beauty, . . . and hast made thy beauty to be 
abhorred." And the same prophet speaks the mes- 
sage of doom to Tyre, at that time wearing 
the very crown of artistic beauty, commercial en- 
ergy* ^d political power: "Thine heart was lifted 
up because of thy beauty; thou hast corrupted thy 
wisdom by reason of thy brightness." Not only di- 
vine Philosophy, but also lovely Art has often been 
a pander to the vile passions of men and "procuress 
to the gates of hell." This is the great lesson which 
that consummate poetic artist, Lord Tennyson, has 
taught in his profound poem, "The Palace of Art." 
He tells the tragic story of — 

" A sinful soul possessed of many gifts, 
A spacious garden full of flowering weeds, 
A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, 
That did love Beauty only (Beauty seen 
In all varieties of mold and mind), 
And knowledge for its beauty; or if good, 
Good only for its beauty." 

This soul builds a "lordly pleasure-house" in which 
are gathered the treasures of all times and climes, 
all the finest fruitage of man's best thinking and fair- 



At thd Beautiful Gate. 189 

est working, and having finished her task rejoices 
for a time, — 

" Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth, 
Joying to feel herself alive ; 
Lord over nature, Lord of the visible earth, 
Lord of the senses five." 

Yet it is only for a time; soon enough comes deep 
dread and self-loathing: 

* 

" She howled aloud, ',1 am on fire within ; 
There comes no murmur of reply. 
What is it that will take away my sin, 
And save me, lest I die ?' " 

Beauty itself, through one of its noblest poet-proph- 
ets of the Victorian age, confesses its futility to fill 
the soul of man with lasting satisfaction and peace. 

" Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters, 
Living together under the same roof, 
And never can be sundered without tears." 

"What is it that will take away my sin?" Cul- 
ture has no remedy; Beauty is only a gate leading 
to the presence of the great Healer. All souls with- 
out God are lame and helpless. So the world lies 
at the Gospel Gate in the presence of its perfect 
beauty, and admires its outside glory, but will not 
enter in. 



igo Ths Beauty of Jesus. 



4. The love of the world often closes the soul to 

God's witness of beauty. 

Why did the lame man stay outside? I have 
said that he could see and hear, but did he really 
do so? What if, covetous of coins, he had lost all 
sense of the holy place, and was no longer sensitive 
to its entrancing loveliness? There are those who 
can see only weather in the balancings of the clouds 
and the sunset glow, who hear nothing in the majes- 
tic music of Niagara but the noise of an immense 
water-power, and to whom the mountains are but 
thrust up reservoirs for gold. There are men who 
live and die without really seeing a flower or hearing 
the carol of a bird. "The God of this world hath 
blinded their eyes." To the cripple the Beautiful 
Gate was only a convenient begging stand for tfie 
collection of alms, and God's fair world is no more 
than that for millions of worldlings. 

Yet there was healing at the gate if he could only 
have realized it ; for it is in and out of the gate of 
the kingdom that flows all the streams of healing 
for man's wretchedness and weakness. In the ca- 
thedral at Antwerp hangs one of the greatest re- 
ligious paintings of the world, Rubens's "Descent 
from the Cross." It is a portrayal of the dead Jesus, 



At the Beautiful Gate;. 191 

and of the loving pity that found for Him burial and 
sepulture. Few eyes can behold it without the swift 
tribute of tears. But all around the walls of the 
church, as about so many of the noblest temples of 
Europe, are built the most wretched booths and stalls 
for cheap trade. And so it is everywhere ; men plant 
their filthy tents against the very walls of the City 
of God, and know not and care not for the glory 
of the pictured Christ inside the gates. 

IV. The Beautieui, Gate eeads to a greater 

BEAUTY INSIDE. 

The gate of the temple leads into the temple it- 
self. In the case of the text it seems to have led 
directly into Solomon's Porch, rich with holy mem- 
ories of a splendid past and of the presence and work 
of Jesus Himself. It was believed by the Jews to be 
the one continuous architectural link which united 
the Temple of Herod with the ancient structure of 
Solomon. Certainly it was worth while to go inside. 

1. Man can not know the real beauty of religion 
from the outside. 

Like the pictured windows of a glorious cathe- 
dral its splendor can only be seen from within. What 
fine things have been written about religion by un- 



192 



The Beauty of Jesus. 



believing and immoral men! They are content to 
admire the beauty of Christianity from without the 
gates. Men of very doubtful character have painted 
noble religious pictures, written exquisite spiritual 
songs, and paid the loftiest tributes to the charac- 
ter of Jesus Christ. If they had only come inside, 
with what more divinely glowing colors, in what su- 
pernal strains of poesy, in what enraptured eulogy, 
they could have celebrated the glories within the 
gates of salvation ! All the plory and beauty of this 
world is but the outside of God's temple. Beauty 
leads to beauty, and "Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man 
to declare the things which God hath prepared for 
them that love Him ; but God hath revealed them 
unto us by His Spirit." 

It is this diviner vision of spiritual reality to 
which all the outward loveliness revealed to flesh and 
sense leads the way. Matter is the tongue of spirit. 

" This scheme of things with all the sights we see 
Are only pictures of the things that be ; 
What we call matter is but as the sheath, 
Formed even as bubbles are by spirit breath ; 
The mountains are but firmer clouds of earth, 
Still changing to the breath that gave them birth ; 
Spirit e'er shapeth matter into view, 
As music wears the forms it passeth through ; 
Spirit is Iyord of Substance — matter's sole 
First cause, and forming power, and final goal." 



At the: Beautiful Gate. 



193 



As last the road through the Beautiful Gate shall 
lead our glad feet past the veils of mystery into the 
Holiest Place, where, over the mercy-seat and be- 
tween the shining faces of down-bending cherubs, 
there shall shine for us the glory of the Presence, 
the radiancy of our God. 

2. So the chief use of Beauty is just to make us 
long for more. 

He who hath made "everything beautiful in its 
season," longs to lead us from this outside gazing, 
through His Gates of Beauty, into His house of pres- 
ent grace and coming glory. 

There is a view in the Interlaken V alley which 
is called the Heimweh Fluh, or the Homesick Hill, 
where many travelers take their last view of some of 
the sublimest mountain scenery of earth. There 
is the Rosa range, with its pyramids of alabaster 
whiteness ; the great snow-dome of Monte Rosa ; 
the Jungf rau, in her radiant robes of dazzling purity ; 
and the Matterhorn, cleaving the sky like a wedge. 
After sunset in the Alpine glow, with its flush of rose 
and violet and gold, it is like a glimpse of the Xew 
Jerusalem of the apocalyptic dream. The beauty 
is so great as often to oppress the soul with a weird 
sadness and longing, akin to homesickness. So 
13 



i94 The Beauty of Jesus. 



should the vision of the loveliness of this world 
make us homesick for heaven. Earth's flowers bring 
dreams of those that bloom in fadeless beauty in 
the gardens of God ; the rustling leaves of earthly 
forests prelude the whispering leaves of healing 
decking the trees that grow on the banks of the 
River of Life; the rippling waters here dimly echo 
the musical murmur of the stream, clear as crystal, 
that flows from the throne of God and the Lamb; 
the mountains of earth lift our eyes to the mountains 
of jasper beyond the River of Death. 

V. We are cauvEd to be helpers at the Beauti- 
ful Gate. 

Alas ! there is more than beauty for our behold- 
ing at the gate. We live in a crippled world. For 
a little time we may ignore, hide, or dissemble the 
fact; but it is there. At last we must feel and see 
it; at last our anguished hearts join the common 
wail of human misery, "Be pitiful, O God !" In the 
wedding procession of Marie Antoinette, no lame, 
deformed, or blind were allowed to be seen; but at 
last the ill-fated queen herself stood face to face with 
tragic fate, which has forever dignified her former 
frivolous life with pathos. We can not forever ig- 
nore the tragedy of life. 



At the Beautiful Gate. 



i95 



1. The crippled world calls for human sympathy. 

The human heart is not only the fountain of sin 
and sorrow, but in its power of sympathy holds the 
hint of help. Whatever else we lack, there is love, 
the divine power of loving, which Jesus awoke in 
the hearts of His own. It is well that our hands are 
filled with alms for poverty, and that we raise asy- 
lums and institutes of mercy for the unfortunate, 
but there is a better gift in the gospel message than 
all our fine philanthropies. A richer offering than 
silver or gold is the power to say with the unction 
of a holy conviction, "In the name of Jesus Christ 
of Nazareth, rise up and walk!" The truest artist 
to turn the world's deformity into beauty is the 
evangelist. 

2. Jesus is the only Healer. 

Full help can not be found until He comes. Only 
the Maker of the life can mend it when broken. He 
passed into the inmost sanctuary of Pain, and shed 
a glory on its gloom, and taught songs to its sad- 
ness. When His redemption has consummated cre- 
ation, no more shall misery and deformity lie beside 
His gates of Beauty, but earth shall put off her 
robes of weariness and pain, and robe herself In 
brightness for the great Bridals of heaven and earth. 



196 The Beauty of Jesus. 



"Behold, I have set before you an open door." 
O, ye who lie outside the gates of His perfect beauty, 
why will ye not enter in? Again, I hold up Jesus, 
"the altogether lovely," and plead by His matchless 
beauty that you reject Him not. By the might of 
His name and in the strength of His salvation, arise, 
O crippled souls, and come leaping and rejoicing 
into the courts of God ! 



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